


That this could be the kingdom

by seekwill



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bottom Aziraphale (Good Omens), Catholicism, Charged Hand Touching, First Time, Flashbacks, M/M, Nostalgia, Pining, Priest Aziraphale (Good Omens), Religious Discussion, Religious Guilt, Skeptic Crowley, Top Crowley (Good Omens), Worried Aziraphale (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:15:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21866026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekwill/pseuds/seekwill
Summary: I have lived my whole life with a wrecked heart.Fr. Aziraphale Fell’s present mirrors his past, as long ago roommate, classmate, and former friend Anthony Crowley reappears in his life in an unexpected and disarming way, challenging Aziraphale’s choices, and bringing him back to the breaking point, when he made a decision he couldn’t take back. It isn’t temptation, it’s revelation.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 298
Kudos: 989
Collections: Best Aziraphale and Crowley, Bittersweet Good Omens, Clerical Omens, Glorious Good Omens fic, Good Omens Human AUs, Ineffable AUs, Ineffable Delights to Sink Your Teeth Into, Ineffable life, Ixnael’s Recommendations





	That this could be the kingdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mussimm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mussimm/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [那將會是我們的王國](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23140945) by [bdondon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bdondon/pseuds/bdondon)

> From the absolute gift of a prompt: Confession.
> 
> For my wonderful beta, cheerleader, and above all, friend, Mussimm. I feel very, very lucky to have found you (or, that you found me).
> 
> This piece was lovingly beta'd by [TheKnittingJedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKnittingJedi/pseuds/TheKnittingJedi) and [goldenhufflepuff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenhufflepuff/pseuds/goldenhufflepuff), who both soothed over many anxious nerves. Many, many thanks.
> 
> A content warning: this piece makes reference to real life conflicts, scandals, and crimes within the Catholic Church. They are not discussed in detail, but I wanted to flag it in case any reader wishes to avoid.

_ Oh, the birds of paradise  
_ _ Came to me yesterday  
_ _ Laughed when they told me my fate  
_ _ We'd be cold, we'd be tired, but we could breathe  
_ _ And one day I'm gonna leave this place  
_ _ What's happened to me  
_ _ I was down on my knees  
_ _ I was praying to leave  
_ _ But I never know when I've gone too far  
_ _ This disaster in me  
_ _ What a beautiful dream  
_ _ That told me I'd be cleaner  
_ _ Told me I'd be closer to God _

_ (Birds of Paradise, Basia Bulat) _

##  It is a ghost story

This is not a phone call he expected. “I’m sorry," Aziraphale says, looking at his agenda, as if might hold the answer. "What is this about?”

The woman on the other end of the line, Natalie, she said her name was, clears her throat, is scrupulously professional and upbeat in a practiced way. “The Royal Society Annual Debate. It’s an annual event where we–”

“Yes, I know what the R-S-A-D is. But may I ask why you’re calling me about it?” his voice is clipped short as he checks his watch. It’s Friday, he’s expected at solemn mass in twenty minutes and he isn’t even sure why he deigned to pick up the phone. Yet here he is with the receiver tucked between his ear and shoulder, running the risk of showing up late.

“The topic for the next public debate has been chosen, and your name has been floated to be one of our speakers, to argue a position.”

That’s a surprise. Father Aziraphale Z. Fell does not describe himself as a particularly strong public speaker, nor would anyone else he knows. He can argue his point effectively in writing, he’s even had a few columns picked up by the Guardian that circulated relatively widely (and that somewhat regrettably had gotten him into a spot of trouble with the bishop as well), but when it comes to standing in front of a crowd, speaking on a panel, that sort of thing, he isn’t first on the diocese’s list, nor second or third. He rarely even leads in delivering mass. So that he has been called for this sort of thing is strange, unless they are in dire need and scraping the bottom of the barrel.

He is almost certainly going to decline this woman’s offer, but he’s curious now. “What’s the debate question, my dear?”

The woman clears her throat, and speaks as if she’s reading from a page (because she probably is). “Faith in a world on fire: is there a place for the church on the brink of environmental collapse?”

A long pause. “Well, that’s rather grim, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she says, a dark chuckle escapes her.

“And who, if I may ask, would be arguing the point that there is no place for the church, since I'm guessing you wouldn't assign me to that position?” Some pop atheist perhaps, some Chrisopher Hitchens wannabe.

“Oh,” then she says something that’s muffled, as if her palm is over the speaker, like she’s talking to someone beside her, “I suppose I can tell you. We’ve just confirmed it. It’ll be Anthony Crowley.”

The receiver nearly slips from Aziraphale's grasp and he scrabbles to catch it, his grip tight.

Anthony Crowley. A philosopher of free will and the human condition, whose writings have found a place in common parlance in recent years, having broken free of the university philosophy classrooms where those types of works usually went to die. Maddeningly charming in a disjointed sort of way, quick thinking with an easy wit that’s made him a staple on evening talk shows and the star of widely circulated online videos. Anthony Crowley, who has made a job of carefully dismantling the things Aziraphale is made of. Anthony. Who he shared a room with, once upon a time. 

“He’s the one who brought up your name initially, actually. Bit unorthodox, but then we looked at your work for the Guardian, and your columns in Oremus, and we thought you’d be an excellent counterbalance. Your February column on charity in particular-"

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale interrupts her. Not something he normally does, something he studiously avoids in fact, but he has been shaken and now he can't sort out what to say.

Anthony Crowley, recommending him? Something sour churns in his stomach, the feeling that a very cruel joke is being played on him. This is too much. He closes his eyes a moment, takes a deep breath. “That’s very kind of you to say, Natalie, but I’m going to have to decline your offer. This sort of thing isn’t really in my wheelhouse, but I know I have several colleagues who may be a better fit. I can give you the phone number for the communications office of the diocese, if you like?”

He gives it to her, bades her good luck, hangs up the phone.

Aziraphale would like to say, would love to say that Anthony Crowley isn’t a name he’s thought of for years, but that would be a lie. He suspects there is a part of his brain that has been carved out to hold memories of him specifically. (Like in those diagrams you see, the cross section of the brain. Reading, thinking, vision, fine motor skills, Anthony J. Crowley). 

For a period in the early aughts, there were several weeks he didn’t think of Anthony Crowley at all, and at the end of that time, when the name came to him unbidden again, it was with a pleasant yet regretful realization that it had been the longest time without thinking of him since the two had first met over a decade earlier. And ever since, Aziraphale is lucky if he can go a day without the spectre of Crowley following him like a ghost.

But he has felt like that. Crowley has felt like a ghost, like something firmly and inextricably of the past. Ephemera that Aziraphale can write off as if maybe it was nothing at all. As if in memories of himself as a young man, he has built Crowley up into something he never truly was.

With this phone call, with the woman’s admission that it had been Crowley himself who had suggested Aziraphale for this public exercise the past comes into a knife sharp focus, the flat of the blade cold against his skin. Suddenly, he finds himself sweating, though the office is cool and drafty in the winter. His collar feels awful tight, and he slips an index finger between his neck and the starched fabric, looking for relief. 

His eyes glance over to the clock. Blast. He needs to go. He wills the ghost, who is now less opaque, less transparent, away. Just for now, of course. He is never far. With haste, Aziraphale adorns himself in his vestments, closes the door of his office behind him, and hurries to mass. As he descends the stairs from his office, he prays that this is the end of it. A one-off. A blip. A nothing.

It is a ghost story. It is not real. 

* * *

##  A character

Aziraphale looked out the window and over the grounds. There was meant to be an orientation reception for the new students out on the back lawn. The sky was grey and threatening and he could hear a far off rumble of thunder. A few optimistic organizers were still setting up tables, chairs, laying out some uninspiring looking nibbles. 

A pang of nervousness bloomed somewhere under his diaphragm. It was the first time in his life he was in a place he didn’t know anyone. He was certain that people would be kind. They would have to be, wouldn’t they? It was that kind of place.

His gaze left the scene outside to the crucifix affixed to the wall above his bed. A simple wooden thing featuring a bronzed Christ. Not the least bit austentatious. The whole room was spartan, but he supposed that was the point. The furniture was without feature, the bedspread without pattern, the walls without colour. Aziraphale wondered if they’d be allowed to put up pictures of family, lay out personal items, or if this sort of thing would be strictly forbidden. Not that he had much. Some books, a photo from his family's trip to the Lake District four years prior. 

Not for the first time, he wondered if the nervousness he felt, and that was making a place inside of him was regret. His choice to come here, to do this, to make this his life had been an extreme one. Born of true desire yes, but now that the reality of it was in front of him it felt so much larger.

His father had dropped him off just that morning with a rucksack, duffel bag, and a firm detached handshake. Then he’d waved goodbye uncomfortably, and Aziraphale had watched his old life disappear in a station wagon down the seminary's long driveway. For a moment Aziraphale had wanted to run after him, to yell “No, I’ve changed my mind! I think I’ll go home and open a bookshop instead.” But he hadn’t. He had let a gray, grim priest who greeted him in clipped and serious tones lead him to his room. It was for the best. It was just cold feet. He was where he was supposed to be. (He hoped so, anyway.)

Aziraphale settled on his bed, clasped his hands between his knees. He wondered how many other men would start today. His classmates. His  _ brothers _ . And who would he room with? What kind of person would occupy the bed across from his? A quiet, bookish Oxbridge chap? Maybe an Irish fellow with seven siblings who had two sisters in convents, married off to Christ. It might be interesting to have a roommate from one of the more far flung locales. The Philippines or Nigeria or something. He had heard the number of international applicants had soared as local boys had dwindled.

Then the door to the room flew open and the knob hit the wall with a  _ thwap _ as a tall, thin, ginger man wearing a leather jacket stumbled in laden with bags.

“Oh! Can I help you? Here, let me!” Aziraphale leapt to his feet and lifted one of the bags from the man’s shoulder, placing it gently on the bed, as to not disturb anything inside. He turned back to him to collect another, and noticed that the man had on sunglasses. Inside.  _ Oh dear _ , thought Aziraphale, _ a character _ .

“Thanks,” the man said, momentarily stunned at Aziraphale’s intervention, then dropping the rest of his bags unceremoniously on the floor. “Nice to know my roommate’s helpful. I was worried,” he looked over his shoulder, dropped his voice, and leaned toward Aziraphale conspiratorially, “that everyone here would be a right wanker like that prick that brought me up here.” 

Aziraphale choked. “Father Shipton? I thought he was fine,” he stuttered.

The man reared back, one skeptical red eyebrow cocking above his sunglasses. “Did you really?”

“Ah,” Aziraphale relented. “No. He was a bit, humm, terse.”

“Helpful and diplomatic. Good traits for a roommate.” The man extended his hand, and Aziraphale took it. “Anthony Crawly.”

“Aziraphale Fell,” Aziraphale offered, slightly uncomfortable at what was happening inside his chest as he observed Anthony’s smile.

“That’s a mouthful,” said Anthony, shrugging off his jacket, looking around him for a place to put it. He settled on the chair at the desk at the end of his bed.

Now that the formal introduction had been made, Aziraphale wasn’t sure whether to sit or stand. He lingered awkwardly, watching as his new roommate sorted through his things.

“You from ‘round here? Sound Southern.”

“Ah, not far. Devon.” Anthony didn’t turn to look at him, instead continuing to root through a crumpled shopping bag that looked like it had been recycled several times over. “And yourself?” Aziraphale was quite certain Anthony was not from around here, by the sounds of him.

“Belfast. Bit of a hike. Aha!” He had withdrawn a small, scrappy looking notebook and pencil, shoved it in the back pocket of his faded black jeans.

“What’s that for?” Aziraphale asked, recognizing that perhaps it was not really any of his business the second the question left his lips.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Shot back Anthony. Aziraphale made to apologize when Anthony looked over his shoulder, grinning broadly. He was all ease. 

The sight of it, the knowledge that this man was already teasing him like an old friend sent an electric frisson down Aziraphale’s spine. This was good, this was very good. He might not be entirely alone in this place after all. Maybe his fears of a friendless six years were premature. But, no, he was getting ahead of himself. It had been three minutes. Three minutes was nothing. 

He turned to look out the window again, and felt Anthony come up beside him. They watched people flit around the courtyard, putting the finishing touches on the reception.

“Isn’t it supposed to rain?” Asked Anthony.

As if God Himself had heard him, thunder rolled out above, and fat droplets of rain began to strike the window.

“Oh dear,” muttered Aziraphale.

The organizers on the grass below ran frantically to collect the chairs, the food, and made a mad dash back to the building.

“Well,” said Anthony without emotion. “That went down like a lead balloon.”

“Quite.”

They watched in silence as chaos descended below.

Eventually, Crowley turned back to his things, strewn across the bed and floor. “Since we’ve not got plans for this afternoon anymore, whaddya say we explore a bit, see where things are?”

“I don’t know if we’re supposed to. If we’re allowed to, I mean. Perhaps we should just wait here. Someone will come, tell us what we’re to do.” Aziraphale played with his hands nervously. He had never been much for spontaneity.

“Come on,” encouraged Crowley, smile affable and inviting. “What are they going to do? Toss us out of here on day one? Not bloody likely.” He watched Aziraphale, and, as if sensing the waves of anxiety emanating from the other man, softened. “If we get into trouble you can blame me, how’s that sound? I even  _ look _ like a bad influence. Not like you. You look like a cherub!”

Aziraphale laughed in surprise. “I do not!”

“You do!” Crowley replied, dragging out the final word for emphasis. He was clearly delighted at this turn of events. He placed his hands firmly on his hips. “Whaddya say?”

Aziraphale hesitated, but, oh, why not? “Well, let’s get on with it shall we?” He gestured for Anthony to go ahead of him. “Lead the way.”

“Right,” said Anthony, turning on his heel. “Come on then.”

There was something thrilling about this. There was something thrilling about Anthony. The devil may care attitude, the way he looked, the way he talked, the way he fell into an immediate rapport with Aziraphale without air or hesitation. The entire effect of it was just short of shocking. Startling. Dancing on the edge of overwhelming. He was suddenly, gratefully, happy to be here.

“Are you coming or not?” Called the voice from the hallway. 

“Sorry, yes. Coming now.” Aziraphale followed.

* * *

##  Very much alive

His mother used to say, “don’t go unscrewing the cap.” It was a useful phrase, applicable in all sorts of situations. Don’t ask questions to which you are not interested in the answer. Don’t make someone talk about something they don’t want to. Let sleeping dogs lie. In the run of his life he had referred to it hundreds of times over. He thinks of it now, as he sits in the back row of the auditorium, people chatting and moving around him, shedding their winter coats and hanging them off the back of seats. Programs fluttering in their hands.

He has done something quite ill advised. He bought tickets, and is now attending the Royal Society Annual Debate featuring Anthony Crowley and some poor sap from the C of E who will leave the stage in several pieces, if Aziraphale’s predictions come to pass.

He’s never been to one of these before. That said, he doesn’t get out much. Not recently anyway. He doesn’t think he’s actually left the city in a year, maybe. He sees theatre when he has money to put aside, but an event like this wouldn’t call to him. He’d have never sought it out on his own.

The people who come to these things are well heeled atheists. University professors and retired journalists who’d think him at best provincial and at worst, suspect. Aziraphale’s not stupid, has never been. He knows who these people are and so he knows what side will come out on top tonight.

A couple mutters apologies and pardon mes and he moves his knees to the side to let them by, then recognizing the realities of the space he inhabits, stands, and they shuffle past. As he moves to push his seat down and sit again, the lights dim, and the moderator for the evening takes the stage. She’s blonde and toothy and middle-aged. She’s a television presenter of a very serious news program that Aziraphale has never watched in full. There’s a lengthy preamble about the storied history of this debate, the crucial role it has in the public conversation - _ imagined _ , Aziraphale thinks,  _ the imagined crucial role. _ These people are so self important.

Then she introduces the speakers. He clenches, each and every part of him, quite involuntarily. He had expected to feel a bit on edge but it’s panic creeping in.

The minister from the Church of England comes out and Aziraphale wonders who made the choice to send him. He’s maybe in his sixties. Greying. Balding. If it was going to be an Anglican and they wanted to have a chance tonight they should’ve pushed for a young, outspoken, female vicar. Aziraphale could’ve recommended one, for God’s sake. He meets them at conferences. Perhaps this man is a real radical in the church but he doesn’t look that way and Aziraphale feels badly for him, just ghastly. And then…

Crowley.  _ Anthony _ . Crowley, he supposes. That’s how everyone seems to address him now. He saunters on to the stage. There’s something of a disheveled rock star about him, with the wavy shoulder-length hair and the skin tight black clothes and the glasses, still, even now. Dark glasses covering his eyes. Though maybe, Aziraphale grants, the lights are bright up there and he needs them. 

The woman who sat down beside him gives him a brief nervous look and Aziraphale realizes he must have made a noise when Crowley came out. Some small groan or cough or something to make her wonder who she had ended up seated next to. He feels like a creep.

To see Crowley again, even from this distance feels like he has been bowled over. His breath is mostly gone and an old familiar ache has taken up residence in his chest.

The debaters shake hands, friendly, clapping each other on the arms like a couple of old friends. Crowley’s always had bravado but this false chumminess is not something Aziraphale would have expected. But then it’s been twenty-six years hasn’t it? We can become whole new people in twenty-six years. Yet Aziraphale feels as if he is the same. He feels as if he’s watched Anthony drive away just moments earlier.

The host gives the debaters the option to sit or stand. The vicar - David maybe, Aziraphale misses his name, as his memories come on. Doesn’t matter, anyway - stands. Crowley sits. Slouches. Legs crossed like he’s watching a television at home. It strikes Aziraphale that he doesn’t know who he wants to win, a fact that leaves him more discomfited that he already is. This David chap is ostensibly on his side, and he does say a prayer for him because regardless of what Aziraphale wants, David or whoever he is is going to need it.

The debate begins and the men do what they do best, talk. They offer opening statements, then there’s an extended back and forth. And the minister just recedes, sits back in his chair, so obviously wants to be swallowed up by it that Aziraphale can feel second-hand embarrassment prickle on his skin. 

“The world is ending,” states Crowley, gesturing violently, “the world is ending and there are men, and well, women I suppose but considerably less of them, standing at pulpits and telling the desperate many that God made the earth especially for them and so they can do what they will with it. And so the rivers go black, forests go up in flames, all those creatures that supposedly survived some great flood die en masse before our eyes and everyone is comfortable with that because they believe it’s their  _ God _ given right to make it so.” 

The minister’s voice wavers. “Well, sir, that may be the opinion of some evangelical churches but -”

Crowley cuts him off. “But they’re the loudest! They’re the one steering the conversation, setting the agenda.” Crowley stops, waits for a response and doesn’t get one so keeps going. “And who’s fault is that?”

The whole thing is like that. Crowley just slaughters him. Aziraphale has witnessed a massacre and the audience loves it. They eat it up. They love to be told what they already think. 

It’s sad. And at the same time it’s thrilling to see Crowley up there, so very smart and so very alive and so very close.

He stays in his seat as the audience around him leaves, busies himself with the program, straightens the sleeves of his jacket again and again. He wants to linger in this space. In the place where Crowley last was. It’s not an impulse he understands particularly, but one he gives into all the same. It’s the energy he misses, maybe. Vibrant and greater than and just very, very alive. He is one of the last people out of the auditorium. He retrieves his coat from the cloak room and exits onto the pavement. 

It’s a Thursday night and the streets are busy with movement, even in the cold. Restaurants bustling with diners and narrow streets full of duelling cars. Aziraphale can’t remember the last time he was out on an evening like this. He’s grown frightfully close to being a shut-in in recent years and the mere action of being out at night makes him more nervous than it should.  _ The city is safe, _ he tells himself,  _ you’ve always believed that _ .

He’ll take a walk then. He’ll maybe even skip the underground and walk all the way back to the rectory. He starts south when-

“Aziraphale?”

He freezes. 

“Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale inhales, exhales. Turns around and there he is. The man whose voice dominated the auditorium. “Crowley.” His face is almost the same, just faintly lined from the years since he’s seen him. And Aziraphale knew what Crowley looked like. He’s seen the pictures in magazines and the television appearances. But none of it has prepared him for this.

He’d imagined this, this reintroduction. He’d be cool and polite and even handed, but he can already feel anxiety bloom in his chest. He has not spoken to Crowley in twenty-six years.

“It is you, then. Jesus Christ, how’ve you been?” Crowley is with a tall, flinty brunette with ice blue eyes and a slight overbite. Her hair is pulled severely back from her face. Crowley turns to her, says, “I’ll just be a minute,” and she shrugs and pulls her phone out of her coat pocket, meanders distractedly away from the pair.

“Is that your wife?” Aziraphale watches the woman on her phone, disinterested in this reunion.

Crowley laughs, eyebrows shooting above the sunglasses. Sunglasses still, at night. “Dagon? No, we work together. She does my schedule. But, wow. Look at you.”

Aziraphale hopes he doesn’t look too closely. He doesn’t think that he’s fared that badly over time but he’s still heavier, looks every one of his forty-eight years. But then again, so does Crowley. He’s got lines around his mouth, but his hair is still vibrant red. Impossibly red.

When Aziraphale doesn’t say anything, Crowley continues. “Still with the church then?”

“You know I am.” Crowley looks momentarily taken aback. “They called me about this. The Royal Society. They told me you had recommended me for this… event.” 

“And I wish you’d said yes.”

He laughs, Aziraphale laughs because this whole situation is absurd. Anthony Crowley after all this time, admonishing him for turning down the opportunity to debate with him on stage. Surreal. Outrageous even. It rankles. “What, so you could have wiped the floor with me like you did to that poor chap in there? Like watching a lamb go to slaughter.”

And now Crowley can’t seem to decide decide if he’s wounded or offended. “That wouldn’t have been you though. You’re smarter than him.”

“It’s been a long time, Crowley.” Aziraphale wants to leave.

“I’ve read your work though. The recent stuff. It’s really fucking good.”

But that stops him in his tracks.  _ Really fucking good.  _ He’s not lying, but then, Crowley never did. Perhaps that’s not changed. Perhaps there’s more of the old Anthony there than Aziraphale thought. He allows himself to smile for the first time since Crowley materialized in front of him. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that. You’ll ruin your reputation.”

Crowley laughs, and it’s a real genuine laugh, warm and mischievous. Aziraphale feels transported across time and space to a chapel an hour outside of London, to forests bordering farmer’s fields, to the front seat of a classic Bentley. “Did you think I did well tonight?” He asks and Aziraphale wishes he could see his eyes.

Aziraphale shrugs, will grant him this much. “Discouragingly well.”

And Crowley laughs again, takes a step closer to him and Aziraphale suddenly feels crowded, but holds his footing anyway, grounds himself to the pavement. “Listen, I’ve got somewhere to be,” of course he would, “but I’d really like to catch up. Let’s have dinner, if you like?”

He has never been punched in the gut before. If he had, he suspects it would feel something like this. What parts of the past are they pretending haven’t happened? “Oh, you must be so busy.”

“Not for you.” And there is a falter in the confident persona Crowley has been wearing. There is a place where the fabric’s worn thin. “There’s a new French place in Mayfair. For old time’s sake.”

Crowley’s face looks like there’s pleading in it and even if there wasn’t Aziraphale would’ve said yes anyway. The mention of a French place, a bistro maybe, feels especially pointed. Tailored to him, faith that there’s still something of the past in him. “Alright, we can try to find a time.”

Crowley claps, the facade firmly back in place. “Great. What’s your number?” He is pulling his phone out of his pocket.

Aziraphale reels it off. “That’s my work.”

Crowley looks up. “No mobile?”

“No, if you can believe it.”

Crowley smiles, a secret kind of smile and he looks twenty-two years old. He is sitting on the bed across from Aziraphale and Aziraphale has admitted something ridiculous like how he doesn’t know who Freddie Mercury is (he does now, of course). “I can believe it. Right then. I’ll call you at work. We’ll sort it out.”

“Alright. Er, good night.” Aziraphale goes to turn and Crowley calls after him.

“It was good to see you, Aziraphale. I’m pleased you came.”

Aziraphale waves over his shoulder, realizes that for their entire exchange, he has been digging his fingernails into his hand. He can see the little half moons there, red welts on his skin.

* * *

##  New and furious qualities

They rose from kneeling and Aziraphale made the mistake of flicking his eyes upward. Of all the places he could have looked, directly into Anthony’s face was the absolute worst spot for his gaze to have landed. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Anthony had been doing what he was supposed to be doing - keeping his eyes tight while thinking seriously of the Holy Spirit. But Aziraphale wasn’t following the rules either he supposed, which is how he had gotten himself into this predicament in the first place. 

Because Anthony was looking straight at him, as if he knew Aziraphale would be looking back. No sunglasses now, as the senior priests had firmly requested that he leave them in his room for mass and prayer. And instead of doing the polite and proper thing of immediately averting his gaze and returning to solemn silence, Anthony crossed his eyes at Aziraphale, stuck his thin pink tongue out between sharp teeth.

Aziraphale slammed his eyes shut and choked down a laugh, only moderately successfully. He knew his half cough, half snort would not go unnoticed by the presiding Father, and his distraction would be referenced at some undetermined point in the future.

That he and Anthony got on so well was initially a bit of a novelty to the rest of the men at seminary, teachers and classmates alike. People regarded them as so different, and perhaps in outward nature they were. Crawly slouched while Fell insisted on sitting like he was being graded on posture. Anthony, brash and bold and confident where Aziraphale was more comfortable fading into the background, finding solace in being a wallflower. But at the end of the day, when they whispered to each other over the few feet that existed between Anthony’s bed and his, he found they weren’t that different at all.

They both liked art and took a keen interest in Da Vinci’s sketches (Crawly was somewhat of an artist himself, always sketching away in his tattered notebook, but Aziraphale was useless in that regard), and they both came from large families. It was more than superficial, however. There was something at the foundation of them that felt fundamentally the same. They both, very quietly, had questions. Anthony though had the bravery to voice them, where Aziraphale made efforts to tuck them away in neat little boxes, semi-content in the knowledge that he would learn something here that would resolve them, allow the boxes to fade away into nothing.

An affable classmate from America had christened them the Odd Couple fairly early on in their studies, and while Aziraphale would never have used it himself (Anthony would’ve rolled his eyes so hard he’d strain himself) he privately loved how everyone saw them as a unit. Two by two. 

It had been a few months in when Aziraphale was pulled aside by a senior priest and encouraged to focus more on his studies, to not allow himself to be distracted.

“We cherish the friendships we make here at seminary, but we must not let ourselves lose sight of why we are here in the first place.” The Father raised his eyebrows and pointed towards the ceiling. Aha, God. 

It became clear shortly after that it wasn’t friendship that was the problem, but friendship with Anthony, who had more of a mischievous streak than their teachers would have liked, who occasionally showed up to mass late, who once made a joke at the Pope’s expense that was not very well received at the dinner table at all (even though it was genuinely very funny). 

Yet Aziraphale couldn’t break free of him, the chief reason being that he didn’t want to. He had never in his whole life had a friend like Anthony. Someone who lit him up on the inside, who made life a thrill more than a series of mundane and routine tasks to be repeated day after day until Heaven took him. His heart took on new and furious qualities when Crawly was around, achieved previously unheard of rhythms. Was this what real friendship was like? Was this what he had been missing?

He felt more alive than he ever had. To be engaging with the material that would bring him to the priesthood, to feel closer to God than ever, to have a real and true friend at his side. He would’ve never dreamed himself so blessed.

They stumbled out of chapel, leaning into one another. 

“Mr. Fell, Mr. Crawly!” Called a voice from behind them, and they turned simultaneously. Father Callaghan looked sternly out at them from the end of the hall, adorned in gold and white vestments. The two stopped walking. “Do not forget that you’re on kitchen duty tonight. I do know you like to-” he was sneering, they could even tell at this distance, “forget about these things.”

Crawly gifted Callaghan with a kind of bastardized salute. “Yup. Roger that!” Aziraphale had to turn away to keep from laughing again. He was certain the man’s face would be twisted in frustration and Aziraphale should feel badly, he should, but it was impossible with Anthony loping beside him.

“C’mon,” Anthony said, nudging Aziraphale towards the door to the courtyard. “I need a cigarette.” There was never really a question of whether Aziraphale wanted to go, he just always did what Anthony told him.

They made their way out behind the greenhouse, away from the prying eyes of the main building, looking out at the vegetable patch, their jackets pulled tight around them. This was a common spot for them. Anthony perched on the edge of an upturned bucket and lit up. Aziraphale stood straight, not wanting to lean or sit on anything as to avoid getting his clothes dirty. As he always did, Anthony extended the pack of cigarettes towards Aziraphale, and Aziraphale declined.

“No, not for me, thank you.”

“Nah,” said Anthony, inhaling and sighing. “You’re too good.” 

Sometimes when Anthony said things like that Aziraphale couldn’t tell if he was simply teasing him. Or, possibly, that he was admonishing him instead. Anthony had always had a more relaxed relationship with rules than Aziraphale ever had.

“Thinking of changing my name,” Anthony said, quite unprompted.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he were having a go, or if he was serious. “Oh, to what?”

“Crowley.”

Not a huge change, but, “Why?”

“Think about it,” he looked up to Aziraphale, glasses back on now so his eyes were obscured. “ _ Father Crawly _ ,” he said, imitating someone, but Aziraphale didn’t know who. “Sounds kind of slimy.”

“Hm,” said Aziraphale, considering.

“You don’t like it.” Disappointment laced Crawly’s voice.

“No, it’s not that.” Aziraphale placed a hand lightly on the seated man’s shoulder, to reassure. “I just need to get used to it, is all.”

“Yeah?”

Aziraphale wished he could see his eyes, wished he could tell if Anthony was playing with him. “Anthony J. Crowley. Has a nice ring to it.”

They smiled at one another. Aziraphale realized that his hand still pressed into Anthony’s shoulder. Reluctantly he removed it, sliding one finger off at a time.

* * *

##  You were one of us, once

Crowley is already at the table when Aziraphale arrives, in spite of coming early. He’d walked, hoping that navigating the sidewalks and dodging tourists would help him burn off the nervous energy. He does not know why he agreed to this. For old time’s sake? He doesn’t have anything to say really. And yet, he dressed up for it, as much as he could. 

He lives in clerical clothing most of the time but that’s obviously not appropriate now, and he doesn’t want Crowley to see him in the collar for some reason. He has on a nice pair of trousers, a pressed shirt, waistcoat and a bow tie. Jacket too. He belatedly recognizes on his walk over that this is not the most inconspicuous look. People are so much more casual now. How had he forgotten this?

Crowley isn’t casual though, and it’s a relief. He is clad in black again, as he was on stage. As he is in all of his appearances, Aziraphale has noticed. The man has abandoned colour. Slim cut black trousers, a turtleneck, and a brocade jacket with just a hint of sheen to it. Flash, that’s what they used to say. He’s wearing the sunglasses, and a private part of Aziraphale wishes he would take them off. This whole thing would feel less mysterious, less covert.

Crowley rises as he catches Aziraphale’s eyes and comes towards him, and for a brief, harrowing moment he fears Crowley might try to hug him, but he reaches out for a handshake instead, claps his other hand on Aziraphale’s bicep, soft from age under tweed. He feels more hopelessly frumpy than he usually does. The place where Crowley gripped his arm burns as he takes his seat.

“Glad we could make this work,” exclaims Crowley while picking up the menu, as if this is normal.

“Yes, quite,” says Aziraphale, wary but following suit. He suppresses a gape when he sees the prices. “Good Lord,” he mutters, and Crowley’s eyes flick up, questioning.

“Alright over there?”

“Oh yes, yes. Everything just looks so good.” And it does look good. It’ll just be the only meal he eats out for the next six months, that’s all. Then the words tumble out from a place inside of him he had forgotten existed. “Why don’t you order for me?”

Crowley tilts his head up to him, lips slightly parted.

“Oh, I… I’m sure… you must know what’s good here. More than I would, at any rate.” Aziraphale glares at his menu. He wants to escape his own body.

Crowley, generously, doesn’t push on this, and orders the salmon and gets the scallops for himself. Crowley also orders a cheese plate and a bottle of wine to share.  _ (“You drink, don’t you.” “Yes, of course.” And Crowley smiles.) _

Aziraphale is nibbling on a rather exquisite piece of blue cheese when he launches into the small talk portion of the evening. “I know you’ve been doing well professionally, but what have you been up to otherwise? What happened to you over, well, since I last saw you?” The question hangs in the air a moment as Crowley decides how to respond.

“Was at Oxford for a bit. Graduated. Taught a while.” He pauses, looks past Aziraphale. “Got married.”

Married. Of course he is. Of course Anthony Crowley got married. Why wouldn’t he? He knows blood has rushed to his ears and he prays Crowley doesn’t notice, that it’s masked by the sun glasses. There is suddenly a sick taste on his tongue. It’s disappointment and Aziraphale curses himself at his own heart’s ridiculous betrayal. 

The server approaches with their entrees and they thank her, their conversation paused while she refills their glasses. She leaves the table and Aziraphale swallows the bad feelings, gags on them a little, continues. 

“Do you have any children?”

Crowley shakes his head, swirls his wine in his glass. “Nah, wasn’t in the cards. Have friends with kids though. Get to play cool uncle, then send them home mad on sugar.”

Aziraphale smiles, halfway successfully. The food in front of him is a welcome distraction from the weight settling in his gut. He cuts into his salmon and it is cooked to perfection. The first bite passes his lips and, “Mmm. Oh.” It’s perfect. One bite in and Aziraphale knows it’s going to be the best meal he has all year, maybe his whole life. When he looks up, Crowley is watching him and he flushes, not used to being observed. Crowley looks away, shifts in his seat.

“And your wife? What does she do?” He takes a few deep breaths and studies his plate, tries to will away the colour in his cheeks.

Crowley looks at Aziraphale like he’s sprouted wings. “She’s in academia, but we’re divorced.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Crowley isn’t wearing a ring, he should have noticed. The sick taste recedes.

“Do you not know?”

Aziraphale looks up to him. Crowley’s mouth is soft. There is the faintest colour of wine on his lips. “I didn’t know you were married or divorced.”

“Not that. I’m - I’m gay, Aziraphale.”

His face holds, placid and calm. “Oh, no. I didn’t know.” 

In the whole of his career people have told him their deepest secrets, both inside and outside of the confession booth. Some so mundane he imagines the person just wanted something to hold close to their chest and didn’t have any other options. Some so shocking his toes curled and he had nightmares after.  _ I’m gay _ was one he’s heard hundreds of times. But this isn’t a confession or a secret. This is Crowley stating a plain fact.

And he isn’t surprised, not really, but he is moved. Because having it there, having it sit on the table between them recasts their history. All his memories are tinted differently in an instant, like those black and white vintage pictures that someone adds colour to decades later. Inside his chest, his heart takes on a new and violent pattern.

“You didn’t?” He’s hard to read behind the glasses. His mouth would suggest he’s amused but without his eyes Aziraphale can’t know for sure.

“Not really, no.”

Crowley lets out a mirthless little chuckle, it sits in the space between them, threatens to spoil their food. Aziraphale searches for a safe topic.

“Do you travel much for work?”

And Crowley generously seizes on it. “Too much. Feel like I’m a permanent resident of the Hilton hotel chain. Should carry a passport with their logo on the front.”

A joke. There, they’re back on safer ground. For the moment anyway.

They chat about travelling, the places Crowley likes (Los Angeles, Berlin, Mexico City), the places he doesn’t (Capetown, Paris). 

_ (“You don’t like Paris? Really?” “Nah, doesn’t do it for me.”) _

They talk about work in a roundabout way. Changes in the city. Local politics is somehow a safe topic and they share notes on how they think the mayor is doing. When they agree that he’s actually doing a fair job, all things considered, Aziraphale feels overjoyed that they’ve stumbled onto common ground again. They hit the bottom of the bottle of wine when Crowley brings up Brexit. _ (“Completely horseshit. Shortsighted nonsense.” “Mm. Quite right.”) _ He waves to the server for another bottle and Aziraphale finds himself nodding enthusiastically along with Crowley’s pontification. Mid-rant Crowley reaches over and graces Aziraphale with a heavy pour.

He’s a bit tipsy when Crowley insists they order dessert. Then he barely touches his tart, pushes it over to his dining companion to finish. Aziraphale hesitates. It is, this whole evening has been, very indulgent. Not just the food, but the company. Once they got over the initial hurdle, the evening has been pleasant, easy. Then again, that’s the way it had been with Crowley, until it wasn’t.

Crowley nudges the tart towards him again and Aziraphale makes a show of saying he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth and they both laugh. Crowley remembers.

His fork pushes through the flaky crust, browned to perfection. He hasn’t had something like this in ages. He brings a piece to his mouth and moans. “S’good,” he mutters, and looks up at Crowley.

He’s being watched again. Crowley’s eyes are on him, he can tell even with the sunglasses on. He stops eating, puts the fork down, watches back. He thinks about making a light joke -  _ “Is there something on my face?” _ \- when he knows there isn’t.

Then Crowley speaks in a tone he hasn’t used all night. It’s a cadence that Aziraphale knows but it’s not from what he saw of Crowley in the debate, or in the videos online. It’s an old voice, it has travelled time to be here. “Your people, they fetishize suffering.”

And it’s not a new accusation, nor a rare one. But how Crowley delivers it to him, serves it to him, knocks him sideways. It is the softness in it, the defeat.

“I don’t know that I agree with that.” Again, he searches inside himself for that calm he has cultivated and finds it to the left of where it should be. Puts it on. It doesn’t fit right. He’s certain Crowley will see the mislaid seams, know something isn’t sitting. “You were one of us, once,” Aziraphale offers quietly.

Crowley ignores that offering, takes a drink of his wine. “You walk into a Catholic church and it’s ghastly. You put your boy on the cross, trussed up and emaciated and bloody and you worship it and say it’s the pinnacle of human kindness.” How much have they had to drink? Crowley’s voice is swinging perilously close to wrecked.

“It’s about sacrifice.”

“Who’s, though? Who’s sacrifice, Aziraphale?”

There’s an obvious answer, of course, but that’s not what Crowley is getting at. He is reaching for something much closer to home. Something inside of the body.

“Things are changing,” Aziraphale says, not as an answer, but as some sort of threadbare reassurance.

“How?” Asks Crowley, and it’s an accusation, as much as anything.

“The Pope-”

“The Pope?” Crowley is frustrated, rubs his hand on his face. “The Pope won’t do a thing. It won’t change. Not in the way it should, and not nearly as fast as it needs to.”

Aziraphale and Crowley are time travellers. This is the same. Their faces are lined and their joints feel the weight of their age but this feeling, this feeling was born twenty-six years ago. Crowley wants something from him. Some admission, some promise. And Aziraphale can’t. He can’t.

“What do you want from me, Crowley?” _ Say it. Say something.  _ “Surely you didn’t ask me here to berate me for not making the same choice you did.” He’d be tremoring if not for the weight of the years on his chest.

Crowley is suddenly dumbstruck, as if he is surprised by the situation he’s found himself in, as if he didn’t manufacture it. He puts down his wine glass. “I just wanted to see you.”

“Why?”  _ Tell me, tell me. _

“Do you ever think about it?”

There’s no point in playing clueless. He means their year. The time they had together. “Yes.”

“I saw you, outside the theatre and I thought… I thought we could try this again. We were friends.”

“You want to be friends?”

“Yes,” Crowley says, leaning forward, pleading, almost. He could be pleading.

“I-” Aziraphale is at a loss. “You think I’m silly. For staying.”

“I don’t.”

Aziraphale folds his napkin in his lap.

“I’ve missed you.”

And the card is on the table. Crowley has taken his glasses off and even in the dim restaurant his yellow eyes are bright and shining. Red rimmed. Aziraphale fights for his breath. He cannot lie, and he cannot bring himself to the truth, which would be to say  _ I miss you too. I dreamed of you. Every day of my life _ . So instead he says, in a very small voice, “Is that right?” He sounds more even than he is, nearly masking the tempest that has been stirred up by the mere sight of Crowley’s eyes.

“Could we be friends, you think?”

_ Please. _ “Perhaps.”

“We’ll not talk about work. Alright?” 

It is an olive branch that Aziraphale desperately wants to reach out and take, but all he is is his work. “That’s an awfully difficult thing to do.”

“I’ll try if you will.”

Two steady breaths. Two steady, wretched, revealing breaths where he’s sure somehow his face has shown Crowley every blasted thing that lives inside of him. “Alright.”

They finish. Crowley pays for the whole thing, waves Aziraphale’s cash off.  _ (“This is too much.” “Don’t. I want to.”) _

They say good night outside the restaurant. 

“You need a taxi or anything?” Crowley asks, leaning to look down the street, search for a cabbie to flag down.

“No, I’ll walk. Thank you.” Aziraphale takes a step back, means to say goodbye but instead says “Do you still have that car?”

Crowley looks overjoyed and Aziraphale feels his cheeks break into a smile in response that cannot be repressed. “I do, actually. She’s a good car. Don’t drive her in the city, but in the summer I’ll take her out to the country for a spin.”

“I remember it,” he says, because he does. It was a clunker at the time, but with the money Crowley has now Aziraphale doesn’t doubt that he’s fixed it up, made it look spectacular.

“You liked her.”

“I did.” He smiles, wistful. He did like the car. He mostly liked being in the car with Crowley. Driving somewhere. Being somewhere else. A small universe on wheels.

“You’ll have to come by and see her sometime.” And there is nothing Aziraphale would like more than to slip into the front seat, feel the worn leather under his fingers, look over at Crowley, and pretend the last twenty-six years have never happened. That they are very young again, and that things haven’t had the chance to, oh, go sour.

“Perhaps.” Again, perhaps. Before he can give any more of himself away he nods. “Goodnight, Crowley.” He walks in the direction of his bed, and restrains himself from turning back.

* * *

##  Go anywhere

A free night off and Crowley had indulged him. Taken him to the nearest town with a cinema, and accompanied him to Much Ado About Nothing with minimal grumbling. He suspected the grumbling was primarily for show, ever the contrarian. 

“Did you like it?” Aziraphale asked as they walked down the pavement towards where the Bentley was parked, a great, black, ancient thing Crowley bought from a farmer several months ago and has doted on ever since. He was one of the only students at seminary with his own car, and had the opportunity to become popular as a result, but he wouldn’t let anyone else in it, save for Aziraphale.

“S’alright,” drawled Crowley, looking in shop windows as they passed.

Aziraphale smiled, remembering Crowley laughing through the movie, throwing his head back with it at one point. Aziraphale had liked the movie, yes, but what he really liked was Crowley watching it. He’d had to restrain himself throughout from turning his head, watching Crowley full on. Peripheral vision had to suffice. He loved knowing what made him giggle, what shook out a guffaw. “But you like the funny ones, don’t you?”

“Better than the sad ones. You couldn’t have paid me to see Hamlet or something.”

“What would you have done? Sat in the car? Smoked? Cut a dashing figure for the girls who walked by?”

Crowley pulled out a cigarette and spun so he was slowly walking backwards in front of Aziraphale. “Yeah, something like that.” His cheeks were flush under the streetlamps.

They passed a man huddled in a doorway, and Aziraphale slowed. They’d been into town a few times but he’d never seen someone on the street, standing over a torn open cardboard box that Aziraphale was sure gave scant protection from the cold pavement. This was a thing more common to London, he had thought. Not here. It unnerved him, that in a small town that was supposed to be welcoming and tidy and warm that someone would be out here and sleeping rough.

“Excuse me,” called a reedy voice as they moved past. “Excuse me, lads, sorry. So sorry to trouble you. Could you spare a cigarette?”

Crowley looks to Aziraphale, and Aziraphale knew there is a question mark behind his sunglasses. They both, at the same moment, stopped walking.

“Uh, yeah, sure. Not a problem.” Crowley pulled the package from his back pocket and slid two cigarettes out. “One for later,” he muttered. 

It was strange, Aziraphale thought, to see Crowley uncomfortable with his own generosity. He was generous to a fault with Aziraphale, charitable even. In time and taking him places and pushing over his dessert after dinner. He’d gone one town over to try a French restaurant Aziraphale had been dropping hints about, all the while loudly exclaiming he couldn’t be bothered with French food, “snails and all that. Disgusting.” And Crowley had always reveled in it, teased Aziraphale for taking so much of what he offered. So this was different.

Crowley lit the cigarette for the man, whose fingernails were black with dirt from being outside. His shoulders shuddered. His eyes closed as he inhaled for the first time, end of the cigarette flaring in the night. A sort of peace came over his aged face.

“Real kind of you, thank you. Not a lot of nice young fellas these days.” The man glanced up momentarily, and his eyes were clear and blue. He forced a small smile to his lips that stayed clamped around the cigarette.

Aziraphale didn’t know this man. Knew nothing other than he had found himself in a very bad situation and now he was on the streets, or between homes. That life could be perverse and unkind. 

“Have you had any supper?” Aziraphale asked abruptly. The man looked over to him in surprise. Something of suspicion flickered across his features.

“No,” he said, as if he was unsure.

Aziraphale internally squirmed in discomfort a moment. How best to do this in a way that wouldn’t be patronizing, in a way that wouldn’t be holier than thou. He swallowed a breath and reached into his pocket, then thrust a crumpled bill in his fist towards the man. Ten pounds. The only money he had on him. “Here. I’d like to, for your dinner. It’s not much. Nothing, really.”

Crowley watched the exchange in silence.

With the hand not holding his cigarette, the man reached out, took the note. He was careful not to touch Aziraphale’s hand, and the whole thing was embarrassing for both of them. 

“Thank you,” the man said so quietly, he could barely hear it over the sound of the cars driving by on the street.

“No need.” 

There was a beat of silence and Crowley took the liberty of moving the exchange to its logical end. “Night, then. Take care,” he said, and he pulled on Aziraphale’s jumper to drag him on. 

They were maybe ten feet along, when Azirphale stopped again. “Just a moment, Crowley, sorry.”

“Angel, what are you-” and he watched Aziraphale walk back to the man, fiddling with his wrist.

His watch. It is nothing particularly special. His mother got it for him for Christmas. For all he knew she got it from M&S on sale. He could get another watch.

“I don’t know if it’s worth anything,” he said to the man, startled at Aziraphale’s return. “Probably not, to be honest, but maybe you can get something for it.”

The man said nothing, but took the watch, held it in front of him.

“I’m so sorry, and I hope you can find somewhere to go tonight that isn’t… that isn’t here.” He turned on his heels and hurried back to Crowley, not waiting on a response, not wanting one. It was one of the most inelegant interactions he feared he’d ever had.

“That was your watch,” said Crowley, blowing smoke out into the night in front of him.

Aziraphale’s eyes flicked skywards for a single second, came back down to earth. “I didn’t need it.”

Crowley said nothing further.

When they arrived at the Bentley, Crowley opened the passenger side door for him. Aziraphale nodded in thanks. But he didn’t shut the door, not yet. He looked down at Aziraphale and Aziraphale looked up at him.

“You believe it, don’t you?”

It was as still as he’d ever seen Crowley, as quiet. Aziraphale could see himself reflected in Crowley’s sunglasses. “Believe what?” He asked.

“‘I am my brother’s keeper.’”

“Of course.” Of course he believed it. That was why he was here. “So do you.”

“Mhm,” Crowley said, and took one last long drag from his cigarette. His mouth was set in a grim line. Aziraphale wished he could see his eyes. Those glasses, always in the way. He exhaled and Aziraphale could smell the smoke from his lungs. 

_ (For the rest of his life, when Aziraphale walks past a smoke break on the pavement outside some office building, and smells the smoke as he passes, he will remember this. He will be reminded of it when he passes through the smoking sections of restaurants, when they still had them. Over the years, during trying and lonely times, he will buy the occasional package of Crowley’s brand. He will sit on the porch of whatever rectory he’s living in and smoke one each evening, for as long as the pack lasts. He has no real love for it. When the pack is gone it’s gone until the next time round, a year or two or three later. But when he brings the cigarette to his lips he sees the cigarette on Crowley’s lips and he takes the image with him through the night, and then gets on with his day.) _

Crowley closed Aziraphale’s door and swings around to the driver’s side. Without a word, he pulled away from the curb, and began to drive back.

Neither of them said anything for awhile and Aziraphale couldn’t put his finger on what had shifted. Some tiny earthquake had occurred but he didn’t know the source, or the magnitude. He wished the car had a radio.

“We could keep driving now. We could go anywhere.” Crowley might be joking, must be joking, but his face was serious, his eyes glued to the road. He was less casual than he normally was, sitting up straight with both hands on the wheel, ten and two. 

“I don’t think this car could get us past Farnham,” said Aziraphale, looking for some response. Praying Crowley would smile.

And he did, smile. “Cheek. You sound like a man who doesn’t want to take any more drives in my gorgeous car.” 

“Going to toss me out are you? Who’d accompany you on your outings? Jachike? Paul?”

Crowley laughed a real laugh then, biting and sharp like his best ones were. Jachike regarded Crowley as some sort of eccentric criminal and Paul was the most boring man either of them had ever met.

Aziraphale turned to watch the ripples of laughter travel through Crowley’s body. There was no greater thrill, none that making Crowley laugh. There was no greater thrill than when it was the both of them, alone, driving somewhere, anywhere.

Crowley reached over and briefly grabbed Aziraphale’s forearm. He thumb pressed into his wrist. When his hand withdrew, just a few seconds later, Aziraphale was disappointed.

* * *

##  A world without us

Crowley had proposed the British Museum as some sort of neutral ground, and Aziraphale had said yes. It was a thoughtful choice. It meant they wouldn’t have to stare at each other the whole time. The exhibits would give them something to talk about instead of work. Instead of what they’ve been up to. Instead of the past. 

Aziraphale climbs the steps and Crowley is already there, typing madly away on his mobile. For a moment, and just a moment, Aziraphale allows himself to watch Crowley without his knowledge. There is a smile on his expressive lips, laughing at whatever is on his phone in front of him, and he looks young. Like Aziraphale remembers him. 

There’s something missing too, and it’s not youth. There’s just something the slightest bit off, and then he realizes.

“Do you not smoke anymore?” 

Crowley looks up, watches Aziraphale climb the stairs to him. He slides his phone into the back pocket of his jeans. “No, not anymore. Not good for you or something.”

“Really? That doesn’t sound right.” A gentle laugh passes between the two of them, and Aziraphale wonders if they’ve stumbled onto something workable, some chummy balance. 

The lobby of the museum is bright white and shining. Crowley is a stark black mark in it, conspicuous in every way, even in the throngs of tourists that Aziraphale hadn’t expected, seeing as it’s mid-week in the off season. But, he supposes, it’s never truly off season in London.

They make a stop at the Rosetta Stone and it’s hounded by tourists taking photos, as it always is. They talk about the exhibits, tourism, the weather. Surface stuff, safe stuff. Staying well out of the woods. There is something in Aziraphale’s throat the whole time.

They are standing in front of a statue of some Greek nobleman when an American voice rings out behind them.

“A.J.?” 

Crowley turns swiftly and Aziraphale follows him with his eyes. There is a striking woman with black hair in plaits, decked out in dark shawls and heavy silver jewelry. When their eyes meet, hers and Crowley’s, both their faces split into wide smiles.

“Hiya, love.” There is a real depth of fondness in his voice. A warmth that sounds like butter. They kiss on the cheek, embrace. Her jewelry clinks against the buttons on Crowley’s shirt. “What are you doing here?” He asks, incredulous. “Not your scene.”

“This shrine to colonial theft? No.” She laughs and looks over her shoulder, then leans into Crowley’s space and whispers conspiratorially. “But Mom and Mariana are in town so we’re doing the whole tourist thing. Buckingham Palace next.” 

“Your mum? Oh, Christ, don’t let her see me!” They laugh together again. There is history with these two.

Mid-laugh, the woman’s big brown eyes land on Aziraphale, and her laughter trails off. “I’m so sorry, I just barged right into your conversation. I’m Anathema.” She extends an elegant hand, nails painted dark, adorned with rings. He takes it gingerly. It’s fine-boned and warm.

“Aziraphale,” he says, and he just catches it, the recognition in her eyes, the sharp silent inhale.

“Oh,” she says, and turns to Crowley, eyes bright with questions. “A.J.’s mentioned you.”

Aziraphale quirks his head to the side. A.J.? Anthony J. has told someone about him. “Oh? I’m sorry, how do you know one another?”

“We were married.”

“Old friends.”

They both speak at once, over one another. They laugh and Anathema reaches out and grabs Crowley’s arm. “Old friends who were married.” She clarifies.

Aziraphale finds himself quite at a loss for words. This beautiful, bright eyed woman was once married to Crowley, and she calls him A.J., and she knows who Aziraphale is. The implications of that are, well, he doesn’t know. But it twists in his gut, regardless.

She turns back to Aziraphale. “I had no idea that-”

Crowley cuts her off. “We just ran into each other recently, that’s all.” Aziraphale can’t see his eyes but instinctively knows he’s warning her off something, of going further.

“Right, right,” she says, nodding. She looks at Aziraphale and he feels like she’s looked right into him, right into his chest cavity and has paced the beating of his heart, can tell that it’s off rhythm, that it has been since Anthony Crowley sauntered back into his orbit. She can see it and she knows and he has not said a word. She speaks to them both but her eyes don’t leave Aziraphale. “I’d love to chat but I better catch up with my family before I lose them in here. It’s been so nice to meet you, to see you.” Finally, she looks to Crowley. “I’ll call you.”

“Yeah, alright.”

She kisses Crowley on the corner of the mouth, her fingertips grazing the lapel of his jacket, then she sweeps out of the gallery, a whirlwind of dark skirts. At the entrance, she turns back and lingers, her eyes landing on them. She smiles at Aziraphale, and the smile says  _ it’s okay _ . And then she’s gone.

Aziraphale clears his throat. “She seems, ah, very nice.”

Crowley smiles a private smile, adjusts his glasses. “Yeah, she’s a mate. Always stood by me, even when she didn’t have to.”

_ Stood by me.  _ It is not an accusation. Aziraphale knows it isn’t. There’s nothing sour or bitter in Crowley’s voice and the only past that he is thinking about is the one that involves his ex-wife. Yet the words sting Aziraphale. They ask him where his loyalties lie. It’s an uncomfortable question and he tries to shrug it off as they move through the galleries.

In the back of the gallery dedicated to the Romans the crowd is thin, and the room is dark. People won’t walk this far back, but there is a display case, lit up like a beacon. Within it, casts of bodies, laid out on sand. A family from Pompeii, the city that disappeared in an instant.

From where they stand, looking over the family lying on their side, they can just hear the dull thrum of the crowd, the occasional parent calling for their child who had slipped away, teens squealing with laughter, trying to fit another friend in a picture on their phones. Aziraphale turns to the side and studies Crowley’s profile. The high bridge, the long line of his nose. Cut cheekbones and a square jaw. He wasn’t always this sharp, maybe. Rough, yes. But not sharp.

“Do you really feel,” says Aziraphale, so quietly, “that the world is about to end?”

Crowley looks over to him, mouth drops softly open, and shakes his head a little, confused by the question.

Under Crowley’s serious gaze he feels the rug has been pulled out from under him. If he thought Crowley wouldn’t insist on knowing what he was on about then he’d abandon the conversation now. He doesn’t know if he wants to know the answer anyway, but he goes on. “In the debate. You said the world was going to end. That it’s ending. Do you believe that?”

“Oh,” says Crowley, and he smiles in a way that’s both sad and amused all at once. “Not really.” Aziraphale waits for him to elaborate, knows Crowley won’t leave it there. “Of course it won’t. It would be a self-centred thing, to think that. The world will be here long after we all die off. After we’ve taken everything she can give us. She’ll tire of it, and we, humans, we’ll end. But the world won’t.” He turns to look back at the citizens of Pompeii, gone to sleep as the life they knew was obliterated in the blink of an eye.

There is a tightness to Aziraphale’s chest that threatens to suffocate him. “Will it be a world though, without us? Don’t we make it one?”

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? Is that what you’re asking? Unless there is a human walking around knowing that they’re there, does the world really exist?” Crowley licks his lips, turns back to Aziraphale. “Do you think we’re that special?”

“Yes.” His answer is immediate, and that strange sad smile is back on Crowley’s lips.

“Course you do.” 

Which we were they talking about?  _ Is it us, you and me? _ Aziraphale wishes he was bold enough to ask. But that’s too much, and whatever the answer is he couldn’t bear it.

“Do you believe there’s anything after all this?” Asks Aziraphale quietly, looking back to the bodies. How sudden it must have been for them. To have no inkling that the end was nigh.

“Heaven? Hell?”

“Anything.”

Crowley pauses, longer than Aziraphale thought he would. And then Crowley surprises him. “I don’t know. Anyone who tells you they know for sure and how they’re going to get there is lying.”

It’s the  _ I don’t know _ that gets him. Crowley is not a man who equivocates. “You sounded very sure on stage.”

“Certainty pays the bills,” Crowley mumbles. “And you? What do you believe?”

To be asked at all displaces him, that Crowley doesn’t assume he knows the answer means the careful facade that Aziraphale has built around himself is wearing thin. So, for the first time, Aziraphale puts into words what has troubled him for years. “I’m not as sure as I once was. But,” and there is a but, thank God for it. “I hope that there is something there for us after. To make all this worth it.”

“All this?”  
Aziraphale gives one long last look to the family, and turns away, begins to walk slowly back to the crowd. “Oh, the trials of life I suppose.”

Crowley follows. “Life doesn’t have to be a trial. I know that’s not the way you’ve been told to think. It doesn’t have to be bad. Life shouldn’t be something to bear so that you get to the good thing on the other end of it.”

“But then, there’s no reward.” He hopes he has successfully masked the fear in those words, about what it means if the end is simply the end.

“This is the reward, Aziraphale. To be in the world with other people, or excellent bookshops. Neighbourhood cafes where they know your name.” Crowley is sure again. 

It’s unsettling to admit how foreign that concept is to him, that to be alive itself is a reward. That the world could be so full of strange and beautiful things and for that itself to be the gift. To speak to Crowley as he is speaking now, for the opportunity to exchange and share without malice. That this could be it, that this could be the kingdom.

But, “what about those who aren’t so lucky? Do we tell them there’s nothing at the end?”

“We try to help them now.” Certain. Sure.

It sounds so simple, and maybe it is.

* * *

##  Speck of dust

“Shh! Shh, shh.” Aziraphale was frantically pressing his fingers to his lips, chastising Crowley as they moved through the trees. Crowley was laughing, his cackles ringing out into the night. The flashlight in his hand flicked in every which direction, giving Aziraphale the impression of a frantic star tumbling through the night sky. Sort of beautiful and manic, and not at all helping Aziraphale walk safely in the direction that Crowley had insisted they go in.

“You want me to be quiet, do you?” Crowley hissed, teasing Aziraphale in a way he didn’t particularly appreciate. Not here in the middle of the night.

“Someone will hear,” he admonished, reaching out and finding purchase on a tree. He squinted down at the ground, searching for roots, things that would trip him up.

“I’ll be quiet then. So quiet it’s like I’m not even here.” And with that, Crowley switched off the torchlight and they were plunged into darkness. The moon was out but it couldn’t be seen through the thick of the tree canopy.

“Crowley,” whispered Aziraphale frantically, to no response. “Crowley! I swear to… I swear. Turn the torch back on.” He stopped moving, eyes wide in the dark. He could just see his hand out in front of him. “Crowley, please.”

A snapped twig, a rustle of leaves. Aziraphale swung his head in the direction of the noise and saw nothing. More shifting to the other side of him.

“Crowley!” He was getting properly angry now, and scared out of his mind. He looked back in the direction he was sure they had come from. Looked for a light from the seminary grounds and saw only the black of night. His breath was coming ragged. “Anthony, please. I hate this. I-”

He yelped like a struck dog when he was grabbed from behind, sinewy arms of rope wrapped around his waist and Crowley’s hot breath on his neck, barely holding back hysterical laughter.

“How very dare you!” Aziraphale cried, not a thought to volume now. His heart raced furiously. Crowley held him tight and Aziraphale braced himself on Crowley’s strong forearms, trying and failing to set himself free. “I didn’t like that at all! It wasn’t funny.”

“It was a bit,” laughed Crowley into Aziraphale’s spine.

“No, not a bit.” Aziraphale’s fear subsided as he realized Crowley was flush against his back. He swallowed and stood there a moment in the dark. Crowley’s laughter faded away. The only sound left in the night the pant of their breathing.

“Um,” started Aziraphale, “now that you’ve taken several years off my life with that fright do you mind telling me where you were intending to take me? Unless this was the point, of course. To make me wet my pants.”

Crowley released Aziraphale. “Did you?”

“What?”

“Wet your pants?”

“I absolutely did not! It was a joke.”

Crowley turned the torch on again, held the light under his pointed chin, his face lighting up red, the shadows falling across his face making him look gaunt and very spooky. He growled and Aziraphale rolled his eyes.

“I’ll go back if you keep this up.”

“Okay, okay,” Crowley acquiesced. “Come with me.” He grabbed onto Aziraphale’s wrist, dragged the shorter man behind him, shone the torchlight on the forest floor, revealing a path of rotting leaves, moss, and thin roots ahead of them. They picked over obstacles until they came to the edge of the wood. “Almost there.”

Aziraphale’s wrist burned where Crowley still grasped it, his guiding hold unnecessary now as it was just grass ahead of them now, except for… he couldn’t be serious.

“Fancy a swim?” Asked Crowley, placing the torch on the ground.

“Crowley, no. We’re trespassing!” Said Aziraphale, voice hoarse and frantic.

The full moon shone off the still water of the pond, bordered by lily pads and reeds. The small pier looked old, the wood splintered and untreated. No one had gone swimming here for years, Aziraphale thought. All the same, the pond belonged to the farmer, and it was never good to be a nuisance to a neighbour, and Crowley was taking off his shirt.

“What are you…?” Aziraphale found himself quite suddenly unable to breath.

The shirt came up and off over his shoulders. Then his trousers, and he was left in a pair of dark boxer shorts. 

Alabaster skin glowed in the moonlight. Crowley’s freckles were constellations across his shoulders. Ribs like the rings of saturn. All limbs and long lines and something not quite of this earth. He seemed so foreign to Aziraphale like this, but then wasn’t this the boy who lay in the bed next to his each night? Hadn’t Aziraphale memorized the slow of his breathing as he fell asleep? There wasn’t a stitch to him and yet he was the greatest thing in the night sky. Aziraphale paled in comparison. Anthony was a giant and Aziraphale was a speck of dust.

“Are you coming?”

Aziraphale was staring. Could Crowley see him? “What?”

“Come on!” Crowley ran as gingerly as he could onto the pier then in one smooth movement dove into the water. There was barely a splash. Aziraphale jogged up to the edge, looked for his nebula red shock of hair to emerge from the water. 

Finally he surfaced, waded and turned to Aziraphale. “Aziraphale,” he whispered hoarsely. “Get in!”

“I’ll do no such thing!” He wrapped his arms around himself, watched as Crowley swam closer to him. His face an unearthly white against the muddy brown water.

“Please, angel.”

Aziraphale softened immediately in spite of himself. He could feel his sour mood fall through his fingers like wet sand. Crowley knew him too well. But he wanted to be convinced. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Angel. Come for a swim. It’ll be fun. I promise.”

Aziraphale’s fingers traced the hem of his shirt. “You promise?”

Crowley nodded, his arms stirring currents just under the surface of the water.

Aziraphale reached down to pull off his shirt, then paused. A flush came to his cheeks, made his ears hot. He prayed it couldn’t be seen in the low light. “Don’t look,” he murmured.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” It sounded like Crowley was aiming for offended and had slightly missed the mark, landing somewhere near injured.

“Please.”

Crowley sighed and spun in the water, swimming to the far side of the pond.

Aziraphale slipped off his shirt, and tucked his socks inside his shoes. The swell of his stomach pressed into the waist of his trousers and he tried to suck it in for a second before giving up. The water was thick with silt. He’d just get in before Crowley could see him. He slipped off his trousers, and stood in his shorts, watching the ripples from Crowley flutter across the water.

He walked to the edge of the pier and dipped his feet in. Cold. The white of Crowley’s eyes were bright in the dark. “Don’t look ‘til I’m in,” Aziraphale whined.

“Why?” The sound of water shifting was the only thing he heard as Crowley waded closer.

“I-” He swallowed. How was it not entirely obvious? One of his soft arms came around his soft middle.

“Aziraphale, stop it.” The words were meant to scold, but the tone was, well, not that. Something warm and aching. Crowley swam up to the dock, lifted himself partially out of the water, chin resting on crossed arms. “Get in the water.”

“It’s cold.”

“Get in.”

“You’re a pest.”

Then Crowley had his arm, had both arms, and was dragging him in and under. He surfaced, sputtering and spitting out water. His toes could just touch the velvety mud bottom. He coughed the water out of his lungs as Crowley snickered.

“Not so bad once you’re in.”

“You’re a bloody menace is what you are.” Aziraphale groped for the dock, pushed wet curls off his forehead. “I don’t even like you.”

“You do,” Crowley bit back, grabbing Aziraphale by the arms again, pulling him back into the water. Back to him. “You do.”

He made the mistake he always made then of looking into Crowley’s eyes, flinting gold in the reflection of the moon off the water, hair plastered down wet and almost black on his white forehead. And even though there was was still brown pond silt at the back of his throat, and the taste of algae and mud on his tongue, Aziraphale wasn’t mad anymore. He was something else entirely. The water shifted around them. Small bubbles rose to the surface.

What did a person call this thing, this thing that made your heart ache for someone even as they were right in front of you? The word for it rattled around in Aziraphale’s belly, almost revealing itself but then retreating, rabbit scared. Did he dare to give it a name? To name something was to make it real, to name something was to welcome it and give it a home.

Crowley’s hands were still on his arms. Aziraphale shifted and broke free, only to hook Crowley’s long fingers with his own shorter, thicker ones. All under the water, all unseen. ( _ If he couldn’t see it he could pretend it wasn’t true, as if that was a framework he operated under, as if he hadn’t built his entire life on the idea that things we couldn’t see being the truest things there were. _ )

In the distance, a door swung on its hinges.

A craggy voice yelled into the night, “Who’s out there?”

“Shit!” Crowley hissed in delight, hands clamping around Aziraphale’s and pulling him towards the pond’s edge. The men scrambled up the bank, feet tangling in reeds and water grass and lily pads, slipping on stones slick with algae and pond muck. They gathered their clothes in their arms and Crowley bent forward as he ran towards the woods, picked up the torch smoothly, whispered back, “Go, go, go!”

Aziraphale clutched his clothes and shoes to his chest, jogged after the torchlight that bounced into the woods. After a minute he caught up and Crowley had his hands over his mouth, his clothes abandoned at his feet, and his shoulders were shaking. He was trying to shove the laughter back in.

Aziraphale’s chest was heaving. He pulled his shirt over his head and it stuck to his body, still entirely wet. He tried to look stern, disapproving. “That’s why we shouldn’t trespass. Getting poor farmers out of bed at all hours,” but there wasn’t any heat to it. Not with Crowley in front of him, wearing nothing but his pants, stuck to his body, the lines of the muscles in his thighs clearly visible.

He pulled on his trousers, grimacing at the sticky feel of dragging them on over his wet legs. The socks he stuck in his pocket, and he wrestled his feet into his shoes. “Get dressed,” he said to Crowley, staring at his own laces. “We can’t go back unless you get dressed.”

“What if I don’t want to go back?” Crowley was leaning against a tree, his head back against the trunk. The torch light illuminating his lower half. He was joking. (He wasn’t joking.)

“Don’t be silly.” Aziraphale bent over, picked up Crowley’s shirt, held it out to him.

“What if I didn’t want to go back?” The question hung. Crowley did not take his shirt.

What if?  _ You have to,  _ Aziraphale wanted to say. _ I couldn’t bear it without you. I need you there. _ But to give air to it would be admitting that God wasn’t enough.

Aziraphale shrugged and pushed the shirt into the centre of Crowley’s thin chest, the outlines of his ribs just visible in the edges of the torchlight. Crowley held the shirt, his fingers just grazing Aziraphale’s as he pulled away.

They snuck in the back door of the seminary, headed up the dark stairwell, and were nearly at their room when a small voice emerged from the dark. 

“Ah, Anthony, sorry, Father Shipton’s looking for you.’ It was John Carlo, a nice enough lad that they never spent any real time with.

“What’s that about? We’re adults, we’re allowed outside.” Crowley was immediately on the defensive and John Carlo stepped back, falling into shadow more than before.

“No, not about that. I don’t think he knows you’ve been out. It’s about, um, I think he got a call from your family.”

They were all still for a moment, as the anger drained from Crowley’s body. Aziraphale reached out, took Crowley’s sweater from his arms. “Go, I’ll wait up for you.”

Without saying a word, Crowley went with John Carlo and disappeared down the stairs.

Aziraphale smelled like pond water. There was a leaf in his hair. He’d shower in the morning. He changed into a clean shirt and boxers, didn’t bother to turn the light on, just left the curtain open for the scant moonlight the night provided. 

It was an hour before Crowley was back.

As the door opened and the dim hallway light sliced through the room, Crowley followed, silent. Aziraphale sat up in bed. “Everything alright?” He asked. He couldn’t see Crowley’s face, but the lines of his body were curled in on themselves.

Maintaining his silence, Crowley shed his shirt and trousers, leaving them in a pile on the floor, a habit he had mostly broken himself of at Aziraphale’s insistence. He pulled back his blankets, refusing to look over at the seated man at the other bed.

“Crowley?”

“My mother died.” Crowley laid down, front turned to the wall, and pulled the duvet up over himself.

Aziraphale’s heart stuttered in his chest. “Oh, oh no, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t. Don’t get upset. We weren’t close.”

They had spoken about how Crowley and his siblings were raised mostly by their grandmother, how his parents had never been much in the picture, showing up for the occasional birthday or first communion. But, still. “It was your mother, though.”

“I’m fine. Go to sleep, Aziraphale.”

“But-”

“Please, just… go to sleep.”

Aziraphale lay down, stared at the spine of the man across from him. Sleep was nowhere near him. It was in a different country. 

He couldn’t have said how much time had passed when Crowley rolled over onto his back, and his long arm unfurled into the space between their two beds. His palm open and turned up. Aziraphale reached out to take it without speaking, squeezing hard, watching Crowley’s sharp profile in the dark.

* * *

##  North Bank

He is seeing Crowley. Not in the modern sense, just the literal one. He has been, is seeing a lot of Crowley. Hearing from him, making plans. They go to dinner when it fits into both their schedules. Then there’s the occasional walk through St. James Park. It’s strange to be friends with someone on the outside again. ‘Refreshing’ is one way of putting it, in the way that escaping a burning building is refreshing. With Crowley he can forget. He forgets himself.

(For example, when they leave a tapas place midweek, having entirely too much chianti in their systems, Aziraphale laughs and lets his forehead fall to Crowley’s shoulder, his fondness for the man that had been dormant all these years waking up in the spring. Crowley’s laughter comes to an abrupt stop and Aziraphale withdraws with a muted apology. They spoke nothing else of it.)

Crowley invites Aziraphale to see a new production of Hamlet at the National. ( _ “I thought you couldn’t be bothered with the tragedies.” “See, the correct response is ‘Thank you, Crowley, how thoughtful of you to invite me.’” _ ) The seats are incredible and the production is a wonder. The cast is young and full of fervour and several times Aziraphale turns his head to look at Crowley, and Crowley is looking at him. He wants to say  _ can you believe we were ever that young? Can you believe there was ever that much life left to us? _ Instead he says “Thank you.” He says it every time their eyes meet.

They stumble out onto the south bank and walk along the Thames in the cool spring evening. It is almost warm. The air is damp and the pavement glistens from the earlier rainfall. The reflections of streetlights and the odd neon sign give the scene an impressionistic quality, something slightly surreal, something not quite of this earth.

Aziraphale looks over the meandering river, black in the night with the tour boats and the Clipper trundling by. On the north side he can just make out people walking, on their way. He thinks about the choices that have led him to right now, to this moment, to this bank. There is some alternate reality where the only difference is that he is on the north bank, looking south. There is some alternate reality where twenty-six years ago he said yes instead of no, and the funny thing is, in that world they’d probably still be right here, strolling along side by side having just left the theatre. The  _ everything else _ though, the two and a half decades in between, that would be different.

Each time he sees Crowley it’s like his heart has lost its short term memory. Each time it is startled into some furious pace by the realization of how much he missed him. He didn’t know it was going to be like this, couldn’t have begun to guess. Sometimes Crowley will laugh or curse or run his spindle thin fingers through his hair (just receding at the temples, just the slightest bit, it makes him look distinguished), and Aziraphale will see the young man he knew as if the years are nothing, as if the choices he made are of no real consequence, after all. It’s nice to believe that he doesn’t have to be accountable for his decisions.

“You’re quiet tonight.” Crowley circles him, then walks backwards for a few steps in front, facing Aziraphale and studying him through his glasses.

“The show, just thinking about it. It was very good.” The show was very good. Aziraphale is not thinking about it. He is thinking about how he misses Crowley. Misses him as he saunters in front of him.

“Yeah.” Crowley looks off to the river for a moment, then turns back to Aziraphale. His mouth is soft, looks soft. “I saw the Guardian picked you up again.”

“Oh, yes. They did. Their standards are so low these days.” Self deprecation has always been a lifeboat. Something almost safe when reason is on stormy seas. Aziraphale wrote about Brexit, how the Church should vocally and vehemently oppose it. He didn’t get in trouble, per se, but Fr. Gabriel had given him a call -  _ This is not a debate we want to be wading into. We don’t want to alienate our congregants _ . Aziraphale thinks that Fr. Gabriel hasn’t taken a close look at the congregation in years, because one, they’re almost certainly not reading the Guardian widely, and two, if they did, they’d likely share Aziraphale’s opinion.

“You didn’t tell me that you were writing something for them.”

“We agreed not to talk about work.”

Crowley ignores that, goes on. “The other stuff you’ve written for them. That letter, about the American nuns…”

The open letter in support of the American women religious who were supporting the American Health Care Act, in spite of warnings from the diocese, the threat of being booted out. He wrote that years ago, and Crowley remembers. “Yes, what about it?”

“It was good. It was really good. Everything you’ve done for them is excellent. That column about the residential schools in Canada, about the Pope not apologizing…”

And another one from the archives. That Crowley has been keeping an eye out for him all this time, it’s a fact. It’s a fact that unnerves him. Crowley has also, in one fell swoop, identified the two pieces that got Aziraphale in the most trouble, that earned him a proper tongue lashing from the bishop. Aziraphale says nothing, looks back to the river, back to the north bank.

“You’re so clever.” Crowley stops in front of him, and Aziraphale has to catch himself before they collide. He cannot avoid looking into Crowley’s face. “You’re better than them, did you know that?”

Aziraphale chokes on his own breath. Crowley pushes his sunglasses up on his head and Aziraphale gets his first proper look at Crowley’s eyes in decades. They are as startling as they ever were. Alight and on fire and begging him to see.

“You’re the only person who doesn’t know that but I can see it. You’re better.”

“Don’t,” Aziraphale says, because he’s not. He’s not better.

Crowley takes a deep breath that Aziraphale can see, can hear. “They’ve made you think you’re wrong. They made me think I was wrong too, but I’m not, and I know that now. I had to get away to learn it.” Crowley’s hands come up and he hesitates, unsure. After a moment where the atmosphere crackles with a dangerous electricity he places them on Aziraphale’s arms. Impossibly, Aziraphale can feel the heat of them on his skin. 

There is something rehearsed about this. There is no spontaneity to it. How long has Crowley been waiting to say this? All night? Since the evening of the debate? Twenty-six Godforsaken years? “When I read what you’ve written, I can see you know where wickedness really lives.”

He might be shaking. He’s shaking. Every doubt he’s ever had threatens to spill out between them. He opens his mouth to speak but there is only silence.

“The Church doesn’t have a monopoly on God, Aziraphale.” Crowley speaks directly to Aziraphale’s greatest fear. That without that building, the collar, that chain of command, that Aziraphale will go without.

“I don’t know who I am without it. I don’t know what I’d do, where I’d go.” His voice breaks in the middle of the admission. This has been his life for more time than it hasn’t. He has lived a life of denial, of who he really is, of who he has loved, of what tenants he holds close.

This is what he believes: he is to be his brother’s keeper; be kind to one another; there is a God, and he is love. The rest of it, the vestments and the relics and the hierarchy and every sodding rule that ends in shame, how did it ever mean so much to him? Has he been lost this whole time? 

_ (What a horrible realization, to suddenly see you have been lost for nearly fifty years, save one. The one where you slept five feet from the first and last person who believed you were truly good.) _

When in his whole life has he been as sure as Crowley is right now? He knows and remembers. He can see it with devastating clarity: Crowley is driving away, the tail lights of the car are fading into the night. Aziraphale’s refusal is fresh on his tongue and he knows then that he’s made a mistake. Every cell he is made of is screaming at him that he has made a huge, sodding mistake. And he stands there in the drive willing Crowley to turn the car around and come back, but he doesn’t.

That’s it, right there. That’s the last time.

Crowley’s hands run down Aziraphale’s arms and he clasps his hands

It is too much. He can’t. “I can’t.” There is too much warring inside him, and Crowley’s warm hands on his has upset the balance. He is absolutely scattered.

Crowley looks as if Aziraphale has slapped him, open palmed across his knife sharp cheek. He drops his hands, puts the sunglasses back on and releases an ugly, ironic little laugh. “You can’t, that’s right.” He turns and begins to walk away then looks back again, hand up and mouth open, poised to speak. He stops and shakes his head, brings up his hand to scrub his mouth, to hold whatever he was going to say in. And he leaves.

Aziraphale stands, glued to the spot, wondering how many times he will relive this moment in the years to come.

* * *

##  Come with me

There had been whispers that Aziraphale had tried to ignore. Surely he’d heard things wrong. Surely there must be some mistake.

It was black out when he was roused from sleep by Crowley’s serious voice. “Aziraphale, are you awake?”

He lifted his head off the pillow to look at the clock radio across the room, the time glowing red, a warning. “It’s after midnight,” he said, voice craggy with not being used. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s kids,” he said breathily, wretched.

“What are you talking about?” Aziraphale turned over in bed to face him in the dark. The starlight that flooded in from the half-opened curtain traced his body with incandescence. Aziraphale could make out the curve of his hip, the sharp angle of his shoulder, his hair messed on the pillow.

“In Ireland. The priests they’re moving around. They’re… they’re messing with kids.”

Aziraphale swallowed, the air around him suddenly heavy, a thick cord wrapped around his chest. “That’s absurd.” But, he had heard the rumours.

“S’not. I’ve heard… I’ve heard they’re just moving them around from parish to parish.”

“Crowley, please.” He didn’t know what he was asking for. 

“It’s sick.”

“They’ll handle it. Whatever it is. The bishops. They’ll surely handle it.” And there was no point in pretending any longer that he hadn’t heard what had been said, that he hadn’t seen news stories in the papers in town that used euphemisms to talk about it. Whatever it was.

“Do you really believe that?” Crowley asked, and he was incredulous. Angry, too. Aziraphale hated it.

“Yes. Now, go to sleep.”

They stopped talking, listened to the other’s angry rasping breathing, out of sync. 

That wasn’t the end of it. Not then. Not ever, really. The whole building was permeated

with an unease. The balance had been upset and they were all on razor’s edge. Tempers were flaring, attention elsewhere.

“Gentlemen, do not believe everything you read,” was what Shipton would say when a mere suggestion of the story would arise. But no one would ask questions. They were all too afraid of what the answers might be.

It will be sorted, Aziraphale told himself every day. In prayer, he pleaded,  _ Do not let these things be true. _

His ease with Crowley was threadbare and nearly gone, patched with disquiet and long uncomfortable silences. When Crowley wasn’t looking, when he was hunched over his notebook or the newspaper, and smoking out the window, Aziraphale would watch him.  _ It’s going to be alright _ , hovered on the tip of his tongue. Anything to puncture the horrible quiet. He didn’t know if it was true though, so he didn’t release it. The silence trudged on.

Until he awoke one night to Crowley hauling clothes out of the wardrobe. Rain pattered against the window ominously. The building creaked with the wind.

“What are you… Crowley. What are you doing?” Aziraphale wiped his bleary eyes, pushed himself up on his elbow.

“I can’t do it,” said Crowley, voice cutting through the room like a freshly sharpened knife, cleaving the night in two. “I need to get out of here.”

“Where are you going?” Aziraphale swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Crowley was shoving his clothes unceremoniously into a duffle bag. All of his clothes. 

“I’m leaving.”

“No.” Aziraphale stood now, not approaching Crowley’s focused frenzy. “You can’t.”

“Says who?” Bit Crowley, spinning around to face Aziraphale, finally, clothes gripped in his fists. “Fucking Shipton? Callaghan? Fucking rotten. He’s rotten. They all are.”

Aziraphale’s nervous hands began to flutter. “Please, Crowley. It’s not… it’s not…”

“It’s not what, Aziraphale. Tell me.”

It felt like an accusation. “It’s not, ah, all bad?”  _ Don’t do this. Do not leave me. _

Crowley shook his head. “I know you don’t believe that. I know you don’t.”

Aziraphale said nothing. It had turned into the most substantial conversation they’d had in weeks.

And then, “Come with me. You’ll come with me.”

He could hear his own heart raging behind his ribs. “What?”

“Pack your things,” and Crowley was opening Aziraphale’s drawers, hauling out the ancient suitcase that was tucked under the foot of his bed. “Get dressed.”

Airaphale stood frozen, watching his things be dragged out, thrown into the suitcase gaping up from him on the floor. “No,” he whispered.

Crowley stopped, but didn’t look up. “No?”

A thick and painful swallow. “No.” If Aziraphale refused, Crowley might stay, would stay. They needed one another, didn’t they? Aziraphale needed Crowley. They would do this together, they would bear this together.

But Crowley looked up, his golden eyes somehow so clear in the dark room. The only clear thing in Aziraphale’s tunnel vision. “Fine,” he said, abandoning his effort with Aziraphale’s suitcase, moving back to his own and finishing his task.

He wanted nothing more than to stop Crowley, restrain him, to hold his arms back until he tired himself out, gave up on this horrible endeavour. He wanted to whisper in his ear  _ don’t you know how much I need you here? Without you I am a nothing man. You woke me up. Please stay. Please stay. I need you so. _

With a heave, Crowley threw the overflowing bag over his shoulders. If he was worried about the belongings he’d leave behind he didn’t show it.

“So, that’s it then. Have a nice life.” And he made for the door, slammed it shut.

Aziraphale stood in the detritus of the last year of their lives. Clothes and books and class notes. Ticket stubs and a half empty cigarette box. A notebook. Crowley’s notebook with his sketches and the lines of readings that he liked. 

He threw on his robe and grabbed the notebook. If Crowley had really meant to leave then he wouldn’t have left the notebook. All his trousers had worn back pockets from where the notebook was shoved in. Crowley took it everywhere. He would not leave it.

Flinging open the door, Aziraphale launched himself into the hallway and made for the stairs. With one hand, he held the notebook. With the other, the lapels of the robe, held shut.

The back door was left open and the rain thundered on the steps. From the doorframe, Aziraphale could see the headlamps of the car cutting through the torrents.

“Crowley!” He yelled into the night, unsure if he’d be heard. “Crowley, please!”

From where he had been leaning into the backseat, Crowley turned, and caught sight of Aziraphale in the doorway.

In bare feet, Aziraphale walked down onto the paving stones. In seconds, he’d be drenched. The rain was torrential and unrelenting. It blurred his vision, but even from where he was he could see the clothes flush to Crowley’s body with wet, his hair plastered down.

There was a moment where they just stood and watched one another in the rain, still, while the sky came down around them. Then Crowley lurched forward and Aziraphale’s heart sang. He is coming back. He is coming back to me.

Crowley was upon him and his fingers wrapped around Aziraphale’s white wrists. “Come with me, Aziraphale, please come with me.” Gone was the sharpness and the anger. Desperation had come in its place and it was plain on Crowley’s face. “I know you,” he pleaded. “I know who you are. Come with me.”

Did he? Did Crowley know him? Aziraphale didn’t know himself in that moment. He felt blank. No aspirations, goals, or beliefs except that Crowley needed to stay here, stay with him.

“We can be on our own side, eh? You and me.” Crowley dropped Aziraphale’s wrists and his hands came to rest on either side of his face, fingers tucked behind his ears, thumbs on his reddened cheeks. “We can go off together.”

Everything, everything shuddered to a halt. The rain faded to nothing, the night disappeared. All there was, was Crowley’s palms cradling his face and his eyes and his lips and, and then what? What happened if he got in that car. Who would he be if he went away? God would be here, in this building behind him. He couldn’t live without Crowley, but he couldn’t live without God. And what was to say Crowley wouldn’t tire of him, that this thing they had wasn’t circumstantial, wasn’t born of proximity and situation?

Finally, most terrifyingly, was a question he hadn’t known how to put words to until this moment.  _ If we call this thing between us by its name, will God love us? Will God love me? _

“I can’t.”

Any colour left in Crowley’s face left it. He dropped his hands. His mouth opened, then closed. Opened again. “Right.” His hands curled into fists, and with one last, awful glare he turned and stalked back to the car.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale whimpered, not loud enough for him to hear. The notebook was still clasped in his hands, held against his chest, against his traitorous heart.

The engine of the car revved and it kicked up gravel as it raced out of the courtyard and around the building. 

“You’re better off.”

Aziraphale turned and Jachike was standing at the door. They must have woken him up, they must have been terribly loud. 

“You’ll catch cold, Az. Come in.”

The robe he was wearing was sodden. Rivulets of water ran down his face. If he was crying, and he thought he might be, it would be masked by the weather. He let Jachike lead him back to the room he and Crowley shared.

“His faith,” started Jachike, looking over his shoulder, as if afraid Crowley would reappear, “it wasn’t strong enough. He never would’ve stayed. Asked too many questions, if you ask me.”

Aziraphale hadn’t asked. He closed the door to his room without bidding Jachike goodnight. He didn’t sleep. He held fast to the notebook.

_ (The notebook will later be lost moving from one parish to another. Aziraphale will never forgive himself.) _

He sat on Crowley’s bed, soaking wet, alone, and thought with sudden clarity,  _ if you come back now, I will go. I will go with you. One more time. Ask one more time. _

Crowley did not come back.

They did not speak again until an encounter outside a theatre, a quarter of a century on.

* * *

##  Salve

A week passes, his isolation thrown into stark relief. Being in Crowley’s orbit had brought colour and sharpness back into his middle-aged existence. Some spontaneity, gaiety, something almost like joy. It starts to disappear almost immediately.

Aziraphale considers picking up the phone, goes as far as to hold the receiver in his hand, to dial the first number, then slips it back into his cradle. What can he say, now? To hear Crowley hang up, to leave a message and never hear back would be worse, somehow. To receive that final rejection… 

Aziraphale swallows his regret, feels it become an ulcer.

He is on confessional duty. He has never liked delivering mass, but this is easier ground for him. It’s not that he enjoys hearing all those supposed sins. It’s the offering absolution that’s a comfort. To feel the relief of forgiveness through the screen. It has been ages since he’s confessed to anyone but his brothers at the cathedral, and that’s less confession and more police work. Keeping one in line, so to speak.

Years ago, not long after Crowley left (the first time), Aziraphale sat in the confession booth in an unfamiliar church, clutching his winter gloves in his hand. When it came time to speak he lost the words. “I had a friend. And I…”  _ I needed him.  _ “He went away.”  _ I sent him off.  _ “I think about him.”  _ I dream about him. He lives under my skin and won’t leave. _

What penance was he assigned then? How was he absolved? He can’t remember. All he remembers was the fear of sitting there, of trying to articulate this massive thing that had made a home inside him. He felt no relief. He just felt raw, and exposed, and tender, and he didn’t know how to care for the wound.

But he can listen now, apply the salve as best he can for others.

He checks his watch. The last confession was fifteen minutes earlier. There are two minutes left to the scheduled time. It’s been quiet, he might as well-

The scratch of the curtain on the rod in the compartment next to him. The shifting of someone sitting. There is breathing there, rasping and nervous.

“Go ahead, I’m here,” says Aziraphale. 

“Bless me, Father. It has been twenty-six years since my last confession. I have not sinned. I don’t believe in it.”

Aziraphale freezes. Everything he is made of comes to a shuddering stop. He does not breathe. “Crowley?”

“Shut up,” Crowley says, on the other side of the screen. He is maybe leaning against it, he is so close. “You know how this works. I know you know how this works.”

Aziraphale does not speak. His hand touches the wall between them, so lightly. Inhale. Exhale. Crowley has come back. He has come back.

“From the moment I met you…” Crowley’s breathing is ragged. Aziraphale’s too. They are on the precipice. They are on the edge of fucking up their entire lives. Crowley groans through the screen. Aziraphale can make out the outline of Crowley’s face and he imagines the rest of it, the creases at the corners of his eyes, forehead pinched in pain. “I have loved you.” Aziraphale’s hands come to his face, his breath is hot on his palms.  _ Oh Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ. _ “Every day of my life. You were so kind. So light, like you were made of air. And warm. I didn’t have words for it then. I didn’t know what it was and when I did, I couldn’t… I couldn’t…”

Aziraphale knows. 

“I thought when I left it would go away, yeah? I thought it would stop but you were always there, in my peripheral vision. You’ve been fucking haunting me. And me, I’m an idiot because I thought seeing you would jolt me out of it. Thought seeing you in your collar and your vestments and still living here and doing this absolute horseshit would dash me out of it but it hasn’t. You’re still good, Aziraphale. You believe some absolute garbage but you’re so good. And being with you, seeing you, all it’s done is remind me that I have lived my whole life with a wrecked heart.” His voice cracks, just inches away. Aziraphale wants to hold him, wants to run his fingertips over that sad, wry mouth. “Why didn’t you come with me?”

He opens his mouth to speak -  _ I wanted to. I was so scared. I didn’t know what was inside of me. I didn’t know what we meant. I was so scared to give it a name. _ \- and says “I’m sorry.”

Crowley breathes hard. “When I look at you… when you look at me…” He stops, he is building up to something, and it comes out in a torrent. “Am I alone in this? Tell me if I’m alone in this, and I will go, and you will never hear from me, ever again.”

Aziraphale realizes that he is crying, has been since Crowley said  _ I have loved you _ . Because it was too much. Too much to hope he would ever be loved, could still be loved now, after all this time, after what he did. That Crowley could keep coming back to him. He sobs, once, tries to choke it back.

“Angel?”

A lightning strike. An electric shock. Crowley calling him angel. “No,” he sputters. His hand comes up and presses into the screen. He is furious there is a wall between them and at the same time, he wouldn’t be able to survive if there was just Crowley and him and these words.

“No?” Crowley’s voice sounds like hope.

“No, you’re not alone in this.” 

Crowley’s hand is on the screen too. He can feel it against his.

To give this thing a name. "I love you." It has always been true. It has never not been true. He drops his forehead against the barrier, and waits to feel shame, but it never arrives. Instead it feels like his ribcage has opened on hinges, and his heart is beating furiously in the open air, gasping for breath. Unburied. Alive. God is present, has not left and will not leave.

“I love you, Aziraphale.”

“How can you forgive me?” He asks. “After what I did.”

“I forgive you.”

“How?”

“Just do. Love you.”

A wound that has been open inside of him since that night in the rain begins to heal. It will leave a scar, but it will heal.

“You will always have a place to go,” says Crowley, voice changed, a cautious optimism taking hold. “If you leave.”

_ When, when. _

Then there are sounds of movement and Crowley’s hand is down from the screen and light briefly shines through from the curtain being opened. Aziraphale scrambles to his feet to open the door to the confessional but the handle flies out from under his fingers, opens up to Crowley, staring at him. Eyes rimmed red and mouth unsteady. In his hand, a business card.

“If you leave.” Crowley thrusts the card at him. “You can stay at my place.”

Aziraphale takes the card, his fingertips brushing against Crowley’s. The brief moment of contact is a revelation. He holds the card in his hands, an address scribbled on the back. 

When Aziraphale looks up from the treasure he holds Crowley leans forward the stops, as if he remembers where he is. “You’re more than this,” he hisses, and even though his voice is small and contained it still reverberates through the empty cathedral. “And you know that.”

He leaves. The heels of his boots click on the terrezine floors, a metronome setting the rhythm to Aziraphale’s heart.

Aziraphale could say that he has a choice to make. But this is no choice. There is one reality now. There is this card.

* * *

##  Tell you what to do

_ You’re not alone in this. _

His fate is sealed when he says it.

_ You’re not alone in this. _

The last twenty-six years, the life he has built, the only one he has ever known. It’s not nothing, but it’s not this. It won’t do to love ideas more than people, for a concept to be worth more than the one man he has ever loved.

The one man who has forever loved him.

He changes his shirt. A soft, well worn blue thing he wears only when no one will see him. He grabs the card from his desk. The address in small, slanted writing. It is a love letter.

Aziraphale leaves the rectory, walks to the curb, hails a cab.

He is shaking. He can barely say the address, finally slips the cabbie the card through the slot in the divider where you’re supposed to pay. When the cabbie reads it and nods, Aziraphale finds his words. “Can I get that back, please?”

The cabbie slides it back and Aziraphale clutches it in his sweaty fingers. Then, worried it might disintegrate, slips it into the breast pocket of the shirt. As the city lights rush past the window - there’s not much traffic this late - his hand rises to touch it through the fabric again and again. Like it might disappear, and in doing so prove that none of it happened.

He could have imagined it. He could’ve imagined amber eyes and long drives in a classic car. Imagined the smell of cigarette smoke by the garden. Crowley’s hot breath on his neck as he held him. Pleading most fervently for Aziraphale to come with him.

He could have imagined Crowley finding him again. The age on his face, the sad set of his mouth. His strong hands. That iron shock of hair.

Crowley’s hand on the grate of the confession booth. His heart that Aziraphale wrecked.

He could’ve imagined it. But when he brings his fingers up to the pocket, rubs over the place the card is, where it stiffens the fabric, it is a totem.  _ You are here. You are alive. You are going to Crowley’s. _

The cabbie pulls up in front of a townhouse, and Aziraphale pushes a handful of pound notes through the space in the divider. He has no idea how much, but he says “keep the change” in a voice that shakes and the cabbie checks twice to see if he’s sure. Must be a lot. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter a lick. He gets out of the cab and the door shuts behind him with a loud snap.

The car pulls away and he is alone on the pavement. A residential street. No one walking by. No sound but the wind blowing through the nearly bare trees, dead leaves that hang on for dear life to empty branches rustling against one another. Rumble from late night traffic on some distant thoroughfare. That, and the dull thump of his heart in his chest, behind his ribcage, against that card. Thump, thump, thump.  _ You are here. _

The curtains are drawn in the front window of the townhouse. It’s dark. Crowley could be in bed.

Aziraphale opens the gate, hears it click shut behind him. Pads up to the front door. There’s a knocker, some lion head with a ring clenched between his teeth. He ignores it in favour of his own fist.

He barely taps the door, but it opens in an instant. 

Crowley. Hair half tied back, t-shirt, pyjama pants. No sunglasses. His heart staggers against the card. Crowley’s moonlit eyes are wide, disbelieving. “I didn’t… I -”

“Can I come in?” It’s as bold a statement as he’s ever made.  _ You are here. _

Crowley steps back, and it’s the only invitation he needs. In the dim entranceway, he hears the door close behind him, snug in the latch. Each door that closes is a marker. Shutting out the old life. The wrong life. The wrong choice.

Aziraphale turns and they look to one another. Some unseen force has its hands on his spine and its pushing him closer to Crowley. He couldn’t stop if he wanted to. He couldn’t stop if he tried. 

He has never kissed anyone.

He kisses Crowley. 

And good Lord. He is undone. 

How was he to have known what this would be like? Crowley’s lips on his, the taste of him, that he would  _ have _ a taste. He is vaguely aware of Crowley holding him up. He is vaguely aware of the sound he’s making. Whimpers like he is a dog. And he is, isn’t he? Crawling back to Crowley.  _ Love me, please. Take me in. Will you be my home? Will you be my person? I’ll be good, I’ll be good. _

“Angel, oh, angel. Fuck,” Crowley whispers into his mouth.

Crowley backs him into the wall, pressing him up against the coats on hooks there. The rustle of fabric on fabric. Something falls to the floor and Crowley ignores it. Kisses him again, grounds long, slim fingers in white curls.

“Is this what you want?” Crowley asks onto his lips. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Crowley’s eyes are the full moon, and Aziraphale is transformed. He only knows how to ask for things on his knees, and so he goes. The hall carpet and scattered shoes and boots press uncomfortably into his shins. He does not know what to do with his hands so he wraps them around the back of Crowley’s thighs, delights at feeling the muscle tense. This is what other bodies feel like. If only he had known, if only he could have imagined. He never would've sacrificed it. He never would have let himself go without. 

“I want you,” he says, looking up, praying, praying so he knows God can hear him, “-to take me to bed.”

“Jesus Christ, Aziraphale.” His face shines. Tears or joy or beneficence.

He brings Aziraphale to standing and kisses him once more, tender and shy, then leads him up the stairs in the blue glow of the night.

_ (“I’ve never-” “I know. We don’t have to do this, do anything you don’t want to do.” “I want to.”) _

A large bed, dark sheets. The light from the street comes through the half-opened curtains. And now this room is the whole world. If they had pushed their beds together, if they had lain together with the moonlight blanketing them would it have been like this?

There is a moment of shyness, of pause where they look at one another and Aziraphale can feel the weight of inexperience draped firm across his shoulders. There is a hunger about Crowley, but he is giving Aziraphale space, room to breath. Aziraphale doesn’t want it. 

His tongue is thick in his mouth. He does not know how to start. But then the words come to him and it is an honest request. “Tell me what to do.”

The only sound is their breathing and so Aziraphale can hear Crowley’s shift. Hears the sharp and shuddering inhale. “Would you like that?” Crowley asks, not taking his eyes from Aziraphale’s face. “Would you like it if I told you what to do?”

“Oh yes,” and Aziraphale steps forward.  _ I’ve always needed someone to tell me what to do, _ he almost says, _ I was taking direction from the wrong voice. _ But to say it would be to bring up the past, to bring up the separation and he does not want it in the room.

He is awash in relief when Crowley comes to him again, cradles his skull in his broad, thin hands. “If you want to stop, at any point-”

“I know.”

“Just say the word, angel.”

“Please, kiss me.”

Crowley does and his hands are everywhere. Ghosting across the line of Aziraphale’s neck, dragging down the front of his chest, kneading the flesh at his sides. Crowley moans into his mouth and Aziraphale swallows it down wanting more more more, he had never wanted so much in his life. How is it possible to want the thing he is currently receiving?

His hands are touching Crowley. The sinewed biceps and slim hips. 

How do they get undressed? In stages broken by kisses, by Crowley holding his trembling hands and pressing his lips to Aziraphale’s knuckles. Aziraphale is back on the bed when Crowley removes the last thing covering him. “Oh, angel,” he says, nothing masking his desire now. They are both flayed open, as if playing roles for so long has exhausted them. There is no pretence here, there is no show. “You gorgeous thing.”

Crowley practically slithers across the mattress, holds himself above Aziraphale and his eyes drop and linger on Aziraphale’s padded chest, the swell of his stomach. A rush of blood comes to his cheeks and Aziraphale’s arm comes to wrap around his front. No one has ever looked at him like this, he never imagined anyone would.

“Shh, no. No.” Crowley’s brow furrows. “Don’t do that.” He takes Aziraphale’s arm and presses it back into the sheets. The gesture has a period on it, it’s a direction, and when Crowley takes his hand away Aziraphale keeps his arm in place. “My beautiful, soft angel. There’s no shame here, understand? Not with me. Shame doesn’t live here.”

It hits Aziraphale like a tidal wave, breaks him in two. He has been told, has told others thousands of times that they are all made in God’s image. He has never known it until now, until Crowley is above him, and Aziraphale can finally see himself reflected in Crowley’s golden eyes. When the tidal wave recedes, the part of Aziraphale that is made of loathing and fear and the things he does not believe in anymore is swept away. He rears up off the bed and crushes Crowley’s mouth to his. Frantic, now. They have wasted so much time. Aziraphale has wasted so much bloody time.

They are pressed together and Crowley is hard and pressed into the valley where Aziraphale’s thigh meets his hip and it is electric. Their bodies are flush and it is shocking, shocking, on the edge of too much but mercifully not there yet. He could live in this frisson forever, could die of it. Would, if there wasn’t the promise of so much more ahead of him.

The friction threatens to unspool him and Crowley can sense it, pulls his hips back leaving Aziraphale whining. “Not yet, love,” he whispers into the middle of Aziraphale’s chest, leaving a kiss behind there. “No rush.” He looks down between them, to where that electric ache lives, then looks up, eyes on fire. “Touch me.”

Aziraphale swallows, and searches for his words. “I don’t know…”  _ I don’t know how. _

“Just, show me what you like, angel. Show me what makes you feel good.”

Aziraphale gulps air as he thinks of the times he’s held himself in his own hands, wished he were not alone. He reaches between them, and feels Crowley’s rigid length. His cock. The word makes him lightheaded. His hand is soft, fingers not too tight, just pulling, just feeling that hot, velvet skin.

Crowley’s moan is thick and fills the room. “Oh, Aziraphale.” Aziraphale can see the shudder wrack through Crowley’s lean form. He is unsteady, and Aziraphale has made him that way. “Did you touch yourself like this?”

Aziraphale nods. “But more like this.” A little tighter now. His thumb sweeps over Crowley’s head, spreads the beautiful wetness there, and Crowley chokes.

“What did you think about, when you had your lovely hand around your fat cock? Tell me, angel.”

Aziraphale's mouth goes dry at Crowley's question. Filthy and gorgeous. “You.”  _ Your back, your arms, the way your legs spread in the front seat of your car. The way your hair would feel in my hands. Your lips on my body. Giving myself to you. _

Crowley bucks into his hands, and kisses Aziraphale, biting his lower lip as he pulls away. The sharp pain it inspires is exquisite, and Aziraphale could’ve never imagined it on his own. Suddenly, a new thing to want. Crowley’s teeth, everywhere. New universes unfurling between them.

Crowley slides down him and Aziraphale has to let him go. A kiss to his sternum, then his belly, his hip. He calls out in surprise when Crowley noses his cock, inhales Aziraphale’s scent and moans. “I could live here, between your thighs.” To demonstrate he bites one, teeth again, but gentle, and Aziraphale grips the sheets because he’s so close. It is effort, it is work to hold back. It’s a miracle it hasn’t just happened, beyond his control.

He feels Crowley’s hot breath on him, his lips so close. “I’ve dreamed of this,” Crowley murmurs, eyes closed. “Of this gorgeous cock between my lips. Inside me, too.”

Aziraphale cries out, and Crowley looks up, eyes dark with lust. “I’m going to, I think I might…” If he says it he will. He knows that. If he says the word he’s a goner.

“You can. You can come,” says Crowley, who can’t stop his smile against Aziraphale’s leg.

“Not yet,” he begs. “I don’t want it to be over.”

“Aziraphale, angel. It won’t be over.” Crowley massages his thigh with strong hands. “You’ll come again. We’re just getting started.”

Crowley takes Aziraphale full in his mouth and Aziraphale lurches upwards off the mattress, yells “fuck!” for the first time in recent memory. He collapses back, every muscle in his body winding up, tight as a harp string, so tight he could snap. His knees pull up and his hands come to his own throat, as if that will somehow pace his breathing. 

Crowley withdraws, replaces his lips with a spitslick palm and hovers over Aziraphale again. “Come for me, angel. Let me see you.”

He will never be able to deny Crowley anything ever again.

Everything falls away, except for Crowley’s hands on him, Crowley’s unsteady voice in his ear, urging him through. “That’s it, my darling. Oh, perfect. You’re perfect for me.”

For a white hot moment, he ascends.

He is a broken man. He is broken in the way he was meant to be broken. He will be rebuilt, better than before. Crowley looks at him like he is a holy thing, and for the first time he feels like it might be true.

They kiss for so long, making offerings of  _ I love you _ onto each others lips, the hollows of throats and slope of shoulders. He has never been warmer, or safer, or more made of love.

Hours later, Aziraphale still boneless and love drunk, Crowley opens him up with his fingers, slow and gentle, speaking psalms into Aziraphale’s skin. ( _ “Fuck, you’ve been made perfectly. You’re so good. I love the taste of you.” _ )

There’s a surreal quality to watching Crowley slip on a condom, like he’s underwater. Everything is muted and slow and light. Soft at the edges. But Crowley’s face is in sharp focus, eyes half lidded and easy smile playing on his lips.

When Crowley eases inside him, Aziraphale marvels at the way he can feel so lifted but also so of this earth all at once. Crowley grounds him and also brings him higher than he’s ever been. Each thrust is met with cries and whimpers and moans, overlapping hymns to their need.

“It’s always been you,” Crowley rasps. “It’s never not been you.”

“I’m yours,” Aziraphale prays most fervently. “I’m yours.”

“You’re mine,” he replies through his teeth, hips snapping and hands holding onto Aziraphale like he is his saviour. He says it again and again until Aziraphale dissolves into incoherence, and like Crowley promised, he comes again, Crowley releasing inside of him.

The golden light of morning spills over tangled sheets, their entwined legs. Aziraphale watches dust particles float through the sunbeam. He struggles to stay awake, not wanting to lose a second to this to unconsciousness. His forehead is slotted into the place below Crowley’s jaw. The sound of Crowley’s heart beating thrums quietly in his ear.

He’s always been an early riser, has always felt closest to God then, and this moment is no different. God is with him, he knows. Because God is love and how could this have been anything else? All of the lies he’s been told, had told, he’ll be angry about them later. He will be furious at the time he spent flogging himself and steeping in shame.

But not now. It doesn’t live here.

Salvation lives here. He is saved.

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to me on [tumblr.](https://bestoftheseekwill.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] That this could be the kingdom (Part 1/3)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23856280) by [Arcafira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcafira/pseuds/Arcafira)
  * [[Podfic] That this could be the kingdom (Part 2/3)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23987503) by [Arcafira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcafira/pseuds/Arcafira)
  * [[Podfic] That this could be the kingdom (Part 3/3)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24165145) by [Arcafira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arcafira/pseuds/Arcafira)


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